Presenteeism Among Health Care Workers

Introduction
There are a number of indexes in occupational medicine that indicate ill health of workers like: fluctuation, accidents at work, occupational diseases, sickness absence, disability and specific mortality. Additionally in the last decades presenteeism has been introduced to study. Presenteeism indicates presence at work in cases when a worker is attending work while ill. The consequences are supposed to be the impact on future ill-health and sickness absenteeism. The aim of the study is to find a share of presenteeists among health care workers at University Medical Centre Ljubljana.

Methods
The research has included all the 7165 workers employed at University Medical Centre Ljubljana. Each worker was given a self-reported questionnaire regarding their presence at work while ill, sickness absences, health status, demographic parameters, work-related factors and psychosocial factors in the period from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010. Descriptive statistic and regression models will be used to describe the association between these factors and attending to work while ill.

Results
So far 3007 workers have responded to the questionnaire. Among received answers 844 (28,1 %) workers declared to be healthy, 262 (8,7 %) reported to be always sickness absent always while ill, 1067 (35,5 %) were pure presenteeists when being ill and 834 (27,7 %) reported to be sometimes presenteeists and sometimes absenteeists. Final results will be available in September 2011 and presented at ICOH meeting.

Discussion
We consider that our population is sufficiently large to investigate sickness presenteeism among health care workers and to prove the possible associations. Preliminary findings suggest that presenteeism might be an important problem among health care workers and needs to be further investigated.