Mental Health Disorders (MHD) are a major cause of human suffering, lost productivity, workplace disability and economic loss throughout the industrialized world. Studies have shown that one in every three Canadians experience mental or substance use disorders in their lifetime.
The economic burden of MHD in Canada is estimated at $51 billion per year. The consequences of MHD directly affect Canadian employers as between 30% and 60% of the related social costs are associated with a reduction in productivity. The Canadian Nurses Association demonstrated that reducing absenteeism levels due to MHD by 50% over three years would put the equivalent of an additional 7,000 full-time registered nurses into the workforce to provide frontline healthcare services.
The primary objective of this study is to determine the factors that support workplace accommodations for workers with mental health disorders (MHD) from the perspectives of supervisors and workers. The secondary objective is to determine the correlation between accommodations supervisors are willing to support and accommodations that workers with MHD would prefer or find beneficial.
The study’s results would shed light on the factors that influence job accommodations for injured workers with MHD and could lead to improvements in interventions for return to work, create awareness of the factors that influence and trigger MHD and provide better understanding for the management of claims associated with MHD. The study would also result in a descriptive account of supervisor preferences for accommodation and a predictive modeling of factors that explain supervisor willingness to accommodate; and a description of worker preferences for specific job accommodations and a predictive model of factors that explain which accommodations workers receive.