| Year Funded: 2012 | Budget: | Funding Agency: Canadian Arthritis Network |
|---|---|---|
| Title: | The Measurement of Work Disability/Disability at Work (IWH Project 2190) | |
| Category: | Compensation, Disability Management and Return to Work | |
| Subcategory: | Compensation, Disability Management and Return to Work | |
| Keywords: | return-to-work, work disability | |
| Link to research website: | www.iwh.on.ca | |
Issue:
This project includes an array of activity all aimed at improving our ability to measure the impact of limitations in health status on a worker’s productivity. This body of work is aiming towards an international consensus on the specific measures that have sufficient evidence of their measurement properties (validity, reliability, responsiveness) to allow them to go forward into clinical trials, research and/or workplace applications. The measures we target in the project identify the impact of an injury or illness on work activities through self-reported limitations in job tasks, or self reported absenteeism. These measures may be used to identify changes in productivity, may be precursors to disability resulting in work absence or indicators of productivity-related costs (specifically the indirect costs of a worker’s input into the model) in an economic appraisal of an intervention.
Objectives:
To understand the construct, application and measurement properties of currently existing measures of work difficulty and work productivity.
To conduct a concurrent comparison of different measures of at-work disability to create evidence where there are gaps – including benchmarking scores for interpreting outcomes.
To provide leadership to two knowledge generation and transfer initiatives: the Outcome Measures in Rheumatological Clinical Trials (OMERACT) worker productivity group and the I-CAN Work-OMERACT Alliance on Work Outcomes.
Anticipated Results:
A thorough understanding of work disability and the level of production lost from injured workers in the workplace will be of particular interest to researchers, employers, employees, insurers, pharmaceutical industry, disability managers and clinicians.
Investigators:
Dorcas Beaton, Benjamin C. Amick III, Claire Bombardier, Monique Gignac, Sheilah Hogg-Johnson, Emma Irvin, Cameron Mustard, Dwayne Van Eerd (Institute for Work & Health), Annelies Boonen(University Hospital Maastricht), Reuben Escorpizo(University of Lucerne), Cathy Hofstetter(Canadian Arthritis Network), Diane Lacaille(University of British Columbia), Kenneth Tang(St. Michael’s Hospital), Peter Tugwell(OMERACT), Suzanne Verstappen(University of Manchester)
