SYKEFRAVÆR-Forskn.om årsaker til sykefrav

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a fundamental change in the way public sector is organized. Also public enterprises and especially those in the social and health care sector have been subject to a variety of changes. These changes are dri ven by political forces aiming to increase productivity and improving the services for the users. Politically generated reorganizations may have the intended positive effects, but may also have unanticipated and undesired side effects for those employed i n the organizations. Research does indicate that such processes of readjustment and reorganization have adverse psychosocial and health outcomes. Until now, studies focusing on the psychosocial effects of work environments on the individual employees ha ve largely neglected the influence of socioeconomic factors. Moreover, approaches focusing on social exclusion and the significance of social inequality in health have been virtually non-existent in the studies of health related exit following workplace r estructuring. Lastly, research on organizational changes has been criticised for being unable to separate between different forms of restructuring. We address these issues here by taking a broad multidisciplinary approach involving explanations focusing o n the role of socioeconomic factors, such as gender, education and social class. Moreover, we will focus on health by applying models from occupational medicine focusing on the unhealthy worker effect among unskilled employees. Access to a unique data mat erial allows the identification of individual effects from a broad range of organizational changes within Norwegian hospitals. Thus, our study will bring about policy relevant knowledge covering a large share of the restructuring processes that has taken place within the specialist health services over the past 15 years. The study will be carried out by a multidisciplinary and internationally experienced research team from five institutions.