Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
November 29, 2024
Summary:
Purpose: To assess sickness absence and transitions from employment for employees with arthritis compared with employees without arthritis over time.
Methods: We use 10 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (2009–2019). The sample (n=38 928) comprises employees aged 50 years to state retirement age. Arthritis was self-reported and could refer to people with conditions under the umbrella term ‘inflammatory arthritis’ or osteoarthritis (hereafter ‘arthritis’). Weighted random-effects multivariable linear probability models were estimated for two employment-related measures (1) sickness absence and (2) transitions from employment to: (a) unemployment; (b) long-term sick; (c) early retirement. These were regressed against a variable for arthritis and confounding factors (age, socioeconomic job classification, employing sector, year and additional health conditions). Additional analyses examined an interaction between the variable arthritis and these factors to test whether the effect of arthritis differs between these groups.
Results: Employees reporting having arthritis were more likely to have sickness absence (1.35 percentage points greater rate (95% CI (0.92, 1.78)) and to transition to long-term sick (0.79 percentage points (0.46, 1.13)) and early retirement (0.58 percentage points (0.05, 1.11)). No effect was found for transitions to unemployment. There was limited evidence that the effects of arthritis vary for employees in different socioeconomic classifications.
Conclusions: Employees living with arthritis have higher rates of sickness absence and greater rates of transitions from employment to long-term sick and early retirement. Further work could look at ways to quantify the implications for individuals, employers and the state and ways to alleviate the effects of living with arthritis on work participation.
Published in
RMD Open
Volume
Volume: 10
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1136/rmdopen-2024-004817
ISSN
20565933
Subjects
Notes
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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