点击显示 收起
Nov. 11, 2003 (New York) -- Employers may end up paying more for lost productivity caused by employees who work through the pain rather than staying at home due to disability.
A new study shows that productive time lost due to common pain conditions such as headaches, back pain, and arthritis costs U.S. employers more than $61 billion dollars per year, and most of that lost time is caused by impaired performance at work rather than work absence.
"Pain is common and treatable condition that results in a significant but largely invisible cost to employers," says researcher Walter Stewart, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Health Research and Rural Advocacy at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Penn.
Stewart presented the results of the study, which appears in the Nov. 12 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, at an American Medical Association briefing on pain management today in New York City.
Researchers say the purpose in doing this study was to make the cost of common pain-related conditions such as headache, arthritis, back pain, and other musculoskeletal pain real to employers.
"Employers will understand what 61 billion dollars means, and they will understand that in any two-week period one in eight workers is losing time from a pain condition," says Stewart. "On average, they're losing about five hours per week."
In the past, researchers say that employers have closely monitored costs associated with worker disability because it creates paperwork and is easy to follow. In addition, most studies on the work-related impact of pain have only looked at lost time due to worker absenteeism in the form of lost or shortened workdays.
But this study shows that's not where the real problem is. Researchers say disability and absenteeism are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lost productive time, and "presenteeism" is actually the largest cause of lost productivity at work.
Presenteeism is defined as reduced performance while at work, which is commonly caused by pain-related conditions, such as headache, arthritis, and back pain.
In this study, researchers measured the impact of impaired work performance based on how often the 28,902 working adults surveyed said they did any of following due to a painful condition in the past two weeks:
The study showed that more than three-fourths of the $61 billion in pain-related losses in productive time occurred at work as a result of this sort of behavior rather than work absence.
Researchers found that 13% of the total workforce experienced a loss in productive time during a two-week period due to a common pain condition. Headache was the frequently cited cause of lost work time (5.4%), followed by back pain (3.2%), arthritis pain (2%) and other musculoskeletal pain (2%).
Workers who had a headache lost an average of 3.5 hours per week of productive time at work, while workers who suffered from back or arthritis pain lost an average of 5.2 hours per week.
Researchers also found that lost productivity due to pain conditions did not differ much by age, sex, or type of occupation. But the largest differences were seen in education levels with those with lower education suffering more from pain at work.
Researchers say this study is one the first to quantify the effects of pain on lost productivity at work, and it may help employers make more effective use of their health-care dollars.
"One thing that's clear about pain conditions is that a minority of individuals account for the majority of lost time," says Stewart.
The study showed that 5% of workers accounted for 29% of the lost productive time, and about a third accounted for three-fourths of the lost productive time.
"That is important for employers to understand because that subgroup that's losing most of the time is a good target for education and intervention," says Stewart.
SOURCES: Stewart, W. The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nov. 12, 2003; vol 290: pp 2443-2454. Walter Stewart, PhD, MPH, director, Center for Health Research and Rural Advocacy, Geisinger Health System, Danville, Penn.