Stahl-Gugger, Alenka
Hämmig, Oliver
Article History
Received: 18 October 2021
Accepted: 7 February 2022
First Online: 3 March 2022
Declarations
:
: This study is observational and not clinical or experimental. Self-reported data used were collected from hospitals and rehabilitation clinics, but survey respondents were employees and not patients. Furthermore, participation in the survey was voluntary and anonymous. Participants were not asked for their name nor for their exact age, which does not allow to draw conclusions on their identity. For all these reasons, informed and explicit consent from respondents was not needed or obtained but implicitly given by participating voluntarily in the survey.The study and survey were carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The study was exempted from requiring ethical approval because the used data do not fall within the scope of the Swiss Federal Act on Research involving Human Beings whose purpose is to protect the dignity, privacy and health of human beings involved in research. This so-called Human Research Act (HRA) explicitly declares in Art. 2 that it does NOT apply to research which involves anonymously collected or subsequently anonymized health-related data. Since the data used were no register data and did not involve medical records or human tissues from patients but instead were self-reports from employees and collected completely anonymously, so that they cannot be traced to a specific person, no formal approval or authorization of the study is required or will be issued, neither by the cantonal ethics committees nor by the cantonal commissioners for data protection. This is not even recommended by the medical-ethical guidelines for scientific integrity of the Central Ethics Committee and the Swiss Academies of Sciences.
: This manuscript does not include details, images, or videos relating to an individual person, therefore no written informed consent for the publication of these details must be obtained from the study participants.
: The authors declare that there are no competing interests.