Predictors of Presenteeism Among Hospital Employees—A Cross-Sectional Questionnaire-Based Study in Switzerland

Abstract

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to examine work-and person-related predictors of the largely "invisible" behaviour and phenomenon of presenteeism among employees in a health-care setting in German-speaking Switzerland. METHODS: Self-reported survey data from 1,840 employees of four hospitals and two rehabilitation clinics collected in 2015 and 2016 were utilized and analyzed. RESULTS: All studied work-related factors such as patient contact, job satisfaction, high work load, forced overtime, fear of job-loss, and particularly mental strain turned out to be significant and relevant predictors of presenteeism. Younger employees, female workers and employees with a chronic disease also were more likely to show presenteeism. CONCLUSION: Work stress, work without patients, job dissatisfaction, a chronic disease and/or a younger age or rather less work experience seem to increase the chances of presenteeism among health-care workers.

Presenteeism, Psychosocial Working Conditions and Work Ability among Care Workers—A Cross-Sectional Swedish Population-Based Study

“…The study showed that presenteeism was most common among care assistants and that its prevalence among nursing professionals did not deviate from that among the all other occupations group. The high prevalence of presenteeism found among care assistants is in line with findings from studies from other countries [3][4][5][6]11,20,[27][28][29]. Unlike the present study, other studies have found that nursing professionals have higher levels of presenteeism than other occupations [7,9,16,17,30].…”

“…Our results showing associations between presenteeism and psychosocial working conditions, particularly high job demands and low job support, are supported by a large number of previous studies of healthcare and social care employees [2,4,7,[9][10][11][12][13]20]. It should be noted, however, that the prevalence of presenteeism has been rather stable over time among health and care employees as well as among the general working population (Statistics Sweden, Swedish Work Environment Survey, scb.se) [22], despite a marked increase in demanding psychosocial conditions in the last few decades in Sweden [26].…”

“…Increased employment insecurity may, for example, increase presenteeism, while increased sickness absence may mean lower presenteeism. Also, the finding of presenteeism being related to previous, present, and future health problems has also been reported in a number of studies [2,3,9,11,12,14,20,[31][32][33]. A couple of studies have shown that intention to leave one's occupation and risk of disability pension are higher among employees in health and care occupations where presenteeism is prevalent [25,34].…”

“…An interesting sex-related finding was that the higher levels of presenteeism found among women in the univariate analyses were no longer found for any of the three groups after controlling for confounders in the stratified analyses. Previous studies have reached contradictory conclusions concerning the differences between women and men, with some showing no differences in the prevalence of presenteeism between the sexes [5,13] and others reporting higher prevalence among women [2,3,11,12]. The reason why the gender differences in presenteeism rates disappeared after confounder control is that factors such as education, exposure to heavy physical work and health symptoms are included among the confounders and that there are sex differences in the prevalence of these factors.…”

“…When it comes to sex-related differences in presenteeism, previous studies have provided inconsistent results. Some studies indicated that women report a higher prevalence of presenteeism than men [2,3,11,12], while other studies showed no sex differences [5,13].…”