Do gender and psychosocial job stressors modify the relationship between disability and sickness absence: An investigation using 12 waves of a longitudinal cohort

Exploring the working conditions of disabled employees: a scoping review

PURPOSE

Disabled people are often overlooked in considerations about work design, which contributes to their exclusion from the labor market. This issue also reflects within research, as the body of knowledge on the working conditions of disabled employees remains relatively limited.

METHODS

A scoping review was conducted to assess the research landscape concerning the working conditions of disabled employees. Five databases have been searched, focusing on relevant studies published between 2017 and 2022.

RESULTS

One hundred fourteen studies were included in the review. It was found that social aspects of work appeared within a substantial portion of the examined studies. Furthermore, it became evident that the interplay of accessibility and flexibility provides an important dynamic to make work design both inclusive and feasible.

CONCLUSION

The recurrent prominence of social aspects, accessibility, and flexibility across the studies shows common challenges and potentials within the work situation of disabled employees. This suggests avenues for future research and inclusive work design.

Psychosocial Working Conditions and Subsequent Sickness Absence-Effects of Pain and Common Mental Disorders in a Population-Based Swedish Twin Sample

OBJECTIVE

To investigate pain and/or common mental disorders (CMDs) in the associations between psychosocial working conditions and sickness absence (SA) while controlling familial confounding.

METHODS

Prospective Prospective twin cohort study included survey data for pain and CMD, register data for SA and psychosocial working conditions. The follow-up from 2005 to 2016 of 28,916 twin individuals for first incident SA spell measured as the main International Classification of Diseases version 10 (ICD-10) diagnosis groups (F00-F99, I00-I99, and M00-M99), or the duration. We used regression models to obtain odds ratio (OR), incidence rate ratio (IRR), or relative risk ratio (RRR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI).

RESULTS

The covariate adjusted models of 9156 SA spells indicated almost no statistically significant associations between psychosocial working conditions and SA.

CONCLUSIONS

Psychosocial working conditions were not associated with SA while familial confounding could not be ruled out.

The effect of mental and physical health problems on sickness absence

Absenteeism is an important feature of the labour market, imposing significant costs on employers and the economy as a whole. This paper is the first to use a large labour force survey sample to investigate how different physical and mental health conditions affect absence rates among prime age workers in the UK. A pooled time series/cross-section analysis reveals that people with a chronic health condition are more likely to be absent from work, and mental health has a significantly larger effect than physical health. From a longitudinal perspective, we find that a change in mental health has an effect on absenteeism more than three times greater than a change in physical health. These findings imply that the prevention and alleviation of chronic health conditions, particularly common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety that are highly prevalent in prime age workers, will deliver significant benefits to the UK economy due to reduced absenteeism. Further, there is significant heterogeneity between different health conditions, with some having no effect at all on absenteeism having controlled for other factors.