Some characteristics of repeated sickness absence

Abstract

Ferguson, D. (1972). Brit. J. industr. Med., 29, 420-431. Some characteristics ofrepeated sickness absence. Several studies have shown that frequency of absence attributed to sickness is not distributed randomly but tends to follow the negative binomial distribution, and this has been taken to support the concept of 'proneness' to such absence. Thus, the distribution of sickness absence resembles that of minor injury at work demonstrated over 50 years ago. Because the investigation of proneness to absence does not appear to have been reported by others in Australia, the opportunity was taken, during a wider study of health among telegraphists in a large communications undertaking, to analyse some characteristics of repeated sickness absence.The records of medically certified and uncertified sickness absence of all 769 telegraphists continuously employed in all State capitals over a two-and-a-half-year period were compared with those of 411 clerks and 415 mechanics and, in Sydney, 380 mail sorters and 80 of their supervisors. All telegraphists in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and all mail sorters in Sydney, who were available and willing were later medically examined. From their absence pattern repeaters (employees who had had eight or more certified absences in two and a half years) were separated into three types based on a presumptive origin in chance, recurrent disease and symptomatic non-specific disorder.The observed distributionof individual frequencyof certified absence overthefull two-and-ahalf-year period of study followed that expected from the univariate negative binomial, using maximum likelihood estimators, rather than the Poisson distribution, in three of the four occupational groups in Sydney. Limited correlational and bivariate analysis supported the interpretation of proneness ascribed to the univariate fit. In the two groups studied, frequency of uncertified absence could not be fitted by the negative binomial, although the numbers of such absences in individuals in successive years were relatively highly correlated.All types of repeater were commoner in Sydney than in the other capital city offices, which differed little from each other. Repeaters were more common among those whose absence was attributed to neurosis, alimentary and upper respiratory tract disorder, and injury. Out of more than 90 health, personal, social, and industrial attributes determined at examination, only two (ethanol habit and adverse attitude to pay) showed any statistically significant association when telegraphist repeaters in Sydney were compared with employees who were rarely absent. Though repeating tended to be associated with chronic or recurrent ill health revealed at examination, one quarter of repeaters had little such ill health and one quarter of rarely absent employees had much.It was concluded that, in the population studied, the fitting of the negative binomial to frequency of certified sickness absence could, in the circumstances of the study, reasonably be given an interpretation of proneness. In t...

Social support and psychiatric sickness absence: a prospective study of British civil servants

“…Psychiatric disorder has become a more prominent cause of certified sickness absence, largely through greater recognition of psychiatric illness (Semmence, 1971 ;Taylor & Burridge, 1982). Psychiatric disorder is also important as a cause of sickness absence because it is often a feature of repeated absence (Taylor, 1968 ;Ferguson, 1972) and is a more frequent contributor to longer spells of certified absence .…”

Team adaptability and task cohesion as resources to the non-linear dynamics of workload and sickness absenteeism in firefighter teams

“…Another limitation in this study would be the fact that we were unable to control for all the psychological and contextual variables that could help to explain the temporal dynamics of sickness absenteeism over time. For instance, we did not know teams' previous trajectories of sickness absenteeism or workload, which could be relevant to predict its further evolution from the moment of data collection onward (Ferguson, 1972;. Furthermore, Bedwell et al (2014) suggest that the subjective and objective experience of workload is greatly determined by the team workload capacity (i.e.…”

“…Such fuzziness is also visible in longitudinal studies reporting distinct trajectories of sickness absenteeism over time. One example regards research by Ferguson (1972), which shows that employees' proneness to engage in multiple sickness absenteeism episodes over time follows a binomial negative distribution (i.e., discrete probability distribution of the number of successes in a sequence of independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials before a non-random number of failures occurs -DeGroot, 1986). Another example regards research by Hausknecht, Hiller and Vance (2008) showing that change in sickness absenteeism follows a linear trend and that this trend is related with Unit-level satisfaction and commitment.…”