¹UR-UPJV EA 3300, APERE - Adaptations Physiologiques á l'Exercice et Réadaptation á l'effort - UFR des Sciences du Sport, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France
²Laboratoire PériTox UMR-I 01, Centre Universitaire de Recherche en Santé, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France
³Groupe Bigard, Flixecourt, France
⁴Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Rehabilitation Sciences and Physiotherapy (MOVANT), University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

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Introduction: Low back pain (LBP) is a major public health problem worldwide and one of the most common workplace complaints. To prevent LBP in the workplace, companies adopt a biomedical approach focused primarily on physical risk factors while workers may have or develop misconceptions or unhelpful beliefs that may influence pain and its chronicity. This study aimed to assess workers’ beliefs about LBP in a meatpacking plant and to develop an educational program based on a more comprehensive approach that integrates the biopsychosocial dimension of LBP. The objective of the educational program is to provide an up-to-date and reassuring view of LBP and to evaluate its impact on workers’ beliefs about LBP.

Methods: This interventional study was conducted on 34 participants randomly divided into a control group who did not benefit from the training program and an educational group who received two training sessions one week apart. The first training session was devoted to "Pain and injury," and "The multifactorial aspect of pain". The second training session was devoted to "The social aspect of pain," and "Movement, physical activity, and posture”. The LBP beliefs were assessed with the French version of the "Back Pain Attitudes Questionnaire" (34 items, Back-PAQ) in the two groups in pre- and post-intervention periods.

Results: In pre-intervention period, the Back-PAQ score was not different between the control group (118.5±9.9) and the educational group (122.5±10). In post-intervention period, Back-PAQ score was significantly reduced in the educational group (83±16.5; -39.5 points, p<0.001), while it did not significantly change in the control group (117.5±10.3; -0.9 points, p=0.57). As a result, in post-intervention period, the Back-PAQ score was significantly lower in the educational than in the control group (-34.5 points; p<0.001).

Discussion: During the pre-intervention period, Back-PAQ scores were high in both groups, higher than that of the general population, which pointed out unhelpful beliefs about LBP in the studied population. This reinforces the need to work on the representation of pain. The impact of the educational intervention seems significant since LBP beliefs were positively modified. Post-intervention, the Back-PAQ score in the educational group was lower than the average score of first-year physiotherapy students. These results confirm those obtained by Beales et al. (2016), who demonstrated that a biopsychosocial intervention could positively influence back pain beliefs of insurance workers. Our study targeted meatpacking workers engaged in physically demanding tasks. This distinction is important as blue-collar workers may hold different baseline beliefs about back pain due to their greater exposure to physically strenuous activities and injury risks. Given these results, we expect this intervention to have a positive impact and may help to mitigate the risk of LBP becoming chronic.

Conclusion: These findings highlight the potential of educational programs to improve LBP beliefs in industrial workers, but further research is needed to explore their long-term impact, not only on cognitive factors that often contribute to the persistence of pain but also on the trajectory of LBP in a positive direction.