The potential-method—an economic evaluation tool

Establishment of reference costs for occupational health services and implementation of cost management in Japanese manufacturing companies

“…The Health Insurance Society, which must endeavor to provide services consisting of health education, health counseling, health checkups, and other services necessary to maintain and promote the health of insured persons by Japanese laws-Health Insurance Act, National Public Officers Mutual Aid Association Act, Local Public Service Mutual Aid Association Act, Mariners Insurance Act, and National Health Insurance Act-often provides a wellness program in occupational settings in Japan, but the cost of this program was outside the coverage of this study because the Health Insurance Society is a separate organization, that is not part of the companies to which it provides services. Some studies have added costs of health-related productivity loss to the total OH services cost 9 , 10) . We did not follow that procedure in this study because we considered health-related productivity loss to be a consequence of OH services.…”

Work Environment and the Bottom Line: Survey of Tools Relating Work Environment to Business Results

“…A procedure for data collection and analysis at “facility level” (production unit) is provided. In the documentation, the method has been applied on medium‐sized corporations and workplaces (100–600 employees) and is useful to analyze and motivate large‐scale intervention programs for which the benefits are distributed over a fairly long time period. The Potential Method (Bergström, 2005) is a tool for carrying out economic analysis of various changes in working conditions. A conceptual framework for health and safety interventions is used (De Greef & Van den Broek, 2004).…”

A systematic review of occupational safety and health business cases

“…Six articles reported on three studies twice so we included each study only once which left us with 18 articles (23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28). In one article, four cases were reported, in another three cases, and in one report, three cases were reported, resulting in 26 cases for use in the review (9,11,24,26,(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42) We excluded cases that: (i) did not concern occupational health but general health interventions such as case studies of influenza vaccination (43)(44)(45)(46)(47); (ii) did not include costs and benefits in monetary terms (48); (iii) did not include productivity measures (49); (iv) did not include the costs of the intervention (50); (v) were economic models only (51); or (vi) had calculated costs and benefits relative only to production (52).…”

“…Personnel managers assessed productivity increases in four cases; these varied from 5-40% (9,30). In one case, there were objective measurements of productivity (28) and in another the lack of quality defects -compared to those that had occurred in the previous year -was taken as the quality improvement (11).…”