Abstract:

Healthcare workers are exposed to different biological pathogens, which implies a risk to their health and cost to the system. In this population, the rate of accidents and diseases related to work is higher than desired (up to 3.2%). The exposure of these agents depends on a series of factors, among which the preventive interventions carried out stand out as a critical point. Airborne pathogens and, therefore, chronic respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, are highly contagious and have severe effects on the workers' health, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis or the sars-covid-19. The symptoms take time to manifest, and the driveway is the airways, which allows the worker not to notice the exposure after the symptoms start to begin. Serval educational plans have been generated and implemented to raise awareness among healthcare workers regarding risk and prevention; simultaneously, organizations and political structures have created prevention policies and updated guidelines.

Nevertheless, previous studies have highlighted that the training and education among healthcare workers are reduced despite the programs created and their cost. At the same, creating more attractive environments for training has been developed in the health field to improve healthcare workers' knowledge and skills, such as virtual environments for surgeries. Despite the development of technological tools and approaches in the health field, creating an educational program using technological still lacks. The current study had as an objective the development and integration of an occupational health and safety learning methodology based on a technological approach focusing on healthcare workers—the prototype of the platform used CakePHP as the primary programming language and for the architecture pattern. The design and diagram of the creation were based on the fourth pillar of any educational platform: feedback, appealing experience, creative design, and assessment of the designed program. The platform was based on gamification as an effective method for adopting this platform's adaptation and valuation as a prevention learning tool. The design of this virtual learning system aims to stimulate the process of knowledge acquisition with a more dynamic teaching process. The prototype's initial evaluation was the context, input, process, and product (C.I.P.P.) method, by which seven specialists in the occupational health and safety and computational systems. The results showed that the prototype was highly defined, but more profound modifications of the context and process were needed, especially for improving appeal and usefulness (5/7). The current study continues to be developed and future implications will be the integration and use among a end user's group of healthcare workers to determine the usability of the technological approach created.

Keywords:

Training, healthcare workers, ICTs, biological agents.