Abstract
BackgroundAlthough illness is an important cause of sick leave, it has also been suggested that non-medical risk factors may influence this association. If such factors impact on the period of decision making, they should be considered as triggers. Yet, there is no empirical support available.The aim was to investigate whether recent exposure to work-related psychosocial events can trigger the decision to report sick when ill.MethodsA case-crossover design was applied to 546 sick-leave spells, extracted from a Swedish cohort of 1 430 employees with a 3-12 month follow-up of new sick-leave spells. Exposure in a case period corresponding to an induction period of one or two days was compared with exposure during control periods sampled from workdays during a two-week period prior to sick leave for the same individual. This was done according to the matched-pair interval and the usual frequency approaches. Results are presented as odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI).ResultsMost sick-leave spells happened in relation to acute, minor illnesses that substantially reduced work ability. The risk of taking sick leave was increased when individuals had recently been exposed to problems in their relationship with a superior (OR 3.63; CI 1.44-9.14) or colleagues (OR 4.68; CI 1.43-15.29). Individuals were also more inclined to report sick on days when they expected a very stressful work situation than on a day when they were not under such stress (OR 2.27; CI 1.40-3.70).ConclusionsExposure to problems in workplace relationships or a stressful work situation seems to be able to trigger reporting sick. Psychosocial work-environmental factors appear to have a short-term effect on individuals when deciding to report sick.
Highlights
Illness is an important cause of sick leave, it has been suggested that non-medical risk factors may influence this association
It has been suggested that nonmedical factors in the work environment or related to private circumstances may influence the individual positively or negatively towards either decision and that work-related psychosocial events may act as absence incentives in this process [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Our results indicate that expected exposure to very stressful work situations can trigger the decision to report sick when ill, in a way that could be regarded as the type of coping suggested by Kristensen [4,7]
Summary
Illness is an important cause of sick leave, it has been suggested that non-medical risk factors may influence this association. If such factors impact on the period of decision making, they should be considered as triggers. Several previous studies have shown that work-related psychosocial factors influence the risk of sick leave [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The respondent was asked whether there were any circumstances (besides illness) that had influenced the respondent’s decision to report sick These answers were coded into “work related” and/ or “private related”. The respondents’ work ability when reporting sick was measured with a question based on the first item of the Work Ability Index [26], slightly modified
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