The perception of students from a higher education institution regarding the importance of education in OSH subjects during COVID Pandemic

Work safety in general is a set of methods that aim to control the risks associated with the workplace. In engineering courses, this discipline is mandatory; however, non-engineering courses are presented optionally. Thus, as not all students have contact with the discipline of safety and health at work, the need arises to understand the perception of students about this discipline. For this, a questionnaire was developed to capture the perception attributed to occupational health and safety. This questionnaire was made available online, via institutional email. The work was carried out at a Portuguese public university. 275 students (80.2% of the expected) enrolled in 17 undergraduate courses (those that are not related to engineering) answered the questionnaire. For statistical analysis, courses were grouped into clusters (N = 10) according to pre-established criteria. As results it was noticed that: (1) in relation to curricular preferences, cluster 3 presented better indicators about the importance of Safety and Health at Work, while cluster 5 presented the worst indicators of importance; (2) in cluster 7, 100% of respondents stated that safety is of utmost importance and in return, only 40% stated the same in cluster 4. It is concluded that there is a difference between the perception of the importance given to Safety and Health at Work among the studied clusters. This highlights how important the dissemination of content is in relation to safety, a factor that has the potential to reduce the perceived disparity among students of the various courses