Many family caregivers of older adults suffer from a high burden of care and struggle with the balance of jobs and caregiving tasks. However, the United States is the only developed country without paid sick leave policies for all workers and their families. The purpose of this article is to review the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and empirical studies about paid sick policy, pro...

CONTEXT Sick leave is a major problem in public health. The Karasek demands/control/social support/strain (JDCS) model has been largely used to predict a wide range of health outcomes and to a lesser extent sickness absence. STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to test the predictive power of the JDCS model in relation with one year incidence of sick leave in a large cohort of workers. ...

BACKGROUND Paid sick leave allows workers to take time off work for personal or family health needs, improving health and potentially limiting infectious diseases. The U.S. has no national sick leave mandate, and many American workers - particularly those at lower income levels - have no right to paid time off for their own or family members' health needs. This article reports on outcomes of a ...

In order to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives, the effects on absenteeism and not just on contracted hours should be taken into account. In particular, absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable. In this paper we examine whether the level of sick leave compensation affects sick leave behavior. Using time-series data for Sweden spanning a l...

Is sickness absence related to attitudes? Several studies point to attitudes as an important factor for sickness absence. We study the relation between sickness absence and attitudes towards possible reasons for sick leave, towards cheating and towards work, by linking a survey among Norwegian healthcare workers, aimed at identifying attitudes, to detailed data on sickness absence from the empl...

The aim of this article is to determine the trends in absenteeism from 2000 to 2012 in Croatia and to examine if the observed trends could be related to the regulations implemented to keep the absenteeism on low level. In Croatia only family doctors keep the responsibility for sick leave and were always been targeted by many regulations to keep absenteeism on appropriate level. A study was obse...

OBJECTIVE To explore the association between disability and sick leave due to lumbopelvic pain in pregnant women in 3 cohorts in Sweden and Norway and to explore possible factors of importance to sick leave. A further aim was to compare the prevalence of sick leave due to lumbopelvic pain. DESIGN/SUBJECTS Pregnant women (n = 898) from two cohorts in Sweden and one in Norway answered to questi...

OBJECTIVE To study the effects on sick leave from an early multidisciplinary assessment at a primary health care centre. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. SETTING Patients who saw GPs at a primary health care centre in mid-Sweden and asked for a sickness certificate for psychiatric or musculoskeletal diagnoses were invited to participate. Patients included were sick-listed for less than f...

BACKGROUND Several studies have addressed psychological problems after terror attacks, especially among victims. Fewer have addressed possible health consequences among rescue workers involved with terror attacks. This study's aim was to investigate the levels of sick-leave and psychological help seeking among rescue workers involved in the terror attacks in Norway on July 22, 2011, and to iden...

Back pain is a common cause of sick leave. We analyzed how individual, work-related and lifestyle factors predicted sick leave owing to neck or low back pain over a 12-year period. In this prospective cohort study, 1,405 rural middle-aged farmers and non-farmers were surveyed in 1990-1991 (participation rate 76%) and followed up 12 years later (participation rate 68%). The 836 men who reported ...