Status of substance abuse literacy in manufacturing and production sites in Iran: Results from a nationwide survey

Background: Due to highly risk-taking behaviors such as alcohol and drug use status of health literacy at workplace is a major concern for health policy makers. Substance abuse literacy (SAL) includes the individuals’ skills to obtain, understand and use substance-relevant health information. This will help to establish a healthy communication in a workplace setting and developing professional knowledge on workplace safety regulations, risky approaches and behaviours that may hurt the community workers. Since poor SAL status would inevitably cause serious harms to both community workers’ health and facilities this study aimed to determine the status of SAL among manufacturing and production workers in Iran. Methods: This is a nationwide cross-sectional survey conducted on 13,600 subjects who were selected through simple randomization into 380 workplaces in 31 provinces of Iran during February 2015 to January 2016. Data were collected through an author-made structured questionnaire by some trained interviewers. The study tool was developed using the literature and then sent to some experts for approving internal validity; minor changes were applied. Internal reliability test in 30 samples yielded Cronbach’s alpha of 0.82. All the questionnaires were administered at the participants’ workplaces following obtaining their consent on releasing blinded information. Results: Given that the score range was from 1 to 5, the mean for SAL in substance abuse was 4.04, so that the highest and lowest means were related to East Azerbaijan (4.22±0.74) and Hormozgan (3.69±0.73) provinces, respectively. Conclusion: This study revealed that the Iranian workers SAL status was fairly high despite the reported high rate of substance abuse (30%) among Iranian workforces. This apparently contradictory finding could be resolved using Syndemics in which refers to clustering of several issues in a society that contribute to and result from socioeconomic and cultural factors and inequalities. Therefore, it is still necessary for policy makers and other researchers to take this issue into consideration in Iranian manufacturing and production plants.