Economic Incentives in Occupational Health - Finnish Business Case Revised

Employers recognize sickness absences and accidents as relevant cost generating incidents in work. Costs are induced by lost of production and services, and active payments of salaries and premiums to insurance system. Occupational health and safety (OHS) are mainly responsible of prevention of these incidents. In Finland occupational health service take actions also to reduce time in absence due to sickness and accidents by more effective health care and return-to-work practices in co-operation with the work place. Economic incentives may tempt employers to use business intelligence and managerial methods also in the field of OHS. To use of economic incentives in OHS calculations of the company costs of sickness absence, long term disability and accidents need to be done in continuous basis. Normal book- keeping practices or human resource registers do not directly support cost calculations and data need to be gathered from several sources and combine from different time periods. The comparison of economic calculations in numerous Finnish companies show marked differences in the sickness absence, disability pension and accident premium costs. Further scrutiny of the figures reveal typical causes of absence, disability and accidents. Also the performance of health care system eg. long waiting times for operations or long return-to-work times can be discovered. The comparisons and valuation of lost work time enables managerial actions both in companies and occupational health services. In some Finnish companies use of economic incentives, promotion of OHS - HR collaboration and devoted managerial actions have resulted in return of work ability and return of investments in the same time.