Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Background This study assessed the psychosocial determinants as explanatory variables for the length of the work disability period. The aim was to estimate the predictive value of a selected set of psychosocial determinants from the Quickscan questionnaire for the length of the sick leave period. A comparison was also made with the most common biomedical determinant: diagnosis.
Methods In a cohort study of 4 981 insured Belgian patients, the length of the sick leave was calculated using Kaplan–Meier. Predictive psychosocial determinants were selected using backward conditional selection in Cox regression and using concordance index values (C-index) we compared the predictive value of the biomedical to the psychosocial model in a sample subset.
Results Fourteen psychosocial determinants were significantly (p<0.10) related to the length of the sick leave: health perception of the patient, physical workload, social support management, social support colleagues, work–health interference, psychological distress, fear of colleagues’ expectations, stressful life-events, autonomy, learning and development opportunities, job satisfaction, workload, work expectations and expectation to return to work. The C-index of this biopsychosocial model including gender, age and labour status was 0.80 (CI: 0.78; 0.81) (n=4 981). In the subset of 2 868 respondents with diagnostic information, the C-index for the same model was .73 (CI: 0.71; 0.76) compared with 0.63 (CI: 0.61; 0.65) for the biomedical model.
Conclusions A set of 14 psychosocial determinants showed good predictive capacity (C-index: 0.80). Also, in a subset of the sample, the selected determinants performed better compared with diagnostic information to predict long-term sick leave (>6 months).
- Disability
- epidemiology
- public health
- health services
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors KG is the main author of the manuscript. She worked on the conception of the project as well as on data collection, analysis and interpretation of the data and writing the manuscript. SD was involved in the data collection processes of this validation study and was a formal connection between the university and the sickness fund organisations. She coordinated the data collection process within the sickness fund organisations and was present in meetings with these organisations. DR reviewed the manuscript. MDB provided support in the practical organisation of the study and has reviewed the manuscript. IB provided support in the analysis and the writing of the manuscript. LG assisted in the data collection processes of this validation study. He assisted in organising meetings with the sickness fund organisations. He assisted in writing and providing feedback for this article. He also contributed to the conception of the project and in the interpretation of the data as well as in writing the manuscript.
Funding This study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance.
Competing interests All authors wish to acknowledge that no part of this work is submitted elsewhere. Saskia Decuman, a co-author in this project, works for the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (funding organisation). She was involved in the organisation of the study and connected researchers with sickness fund organisations. She was not involved in the research process (methods, analysis or writing the manuscript). Otherwise, there was no conflict of interest.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request.