A related literature seeks to uncover factors that determine or affect worker absence by modeling absence [17, 31 35] or focuses on the association between health conditions and absenteeism [36 39].
Our findings support the theoretical predictions of Pauly et al. [9, 11] and provide compelling evidence that the productivity loss due to worker absence exceeds the wage for team workers, especially in small firms.
Health worker absence in LICs is likely to exacerbate human resources for health inadequacies and undermine demand for, quality of and efficiency of delivery of health services.
In the Netherlands, sick leave due to neck pain (NP-SL) was reported to comprise over a quarter of the total NP financial burden, and costed an estimated US$185.4 million from 1.4 million days of lost productivity associated with worker absence [ 5].
To determine the value of routinely collecting worker absence data as part of this kind of surveillance and to assess a threshold level of possible alert cases, directors of six major Italian hospitals were asked for the number of cases that fit the alert definition in 2003.
The rate of worker absences has steadily climbed in recent days and reached a whopping 10percentt on Sunday, up from 3.1percentt on the corresponding Sunday last year, the agency said Monday in a press release.
Reasons for worker absences are tracked, and include: (i) vacation (most common), (ii) illness, (iii) leave of absence (e.g., funeral), and in a few cases (iv) absence due to surgery or treatment for a musculoskeletal disorder at any given observation period.
Not surprisingly, the issue of shortage of health workers and absence due to HIV-related activities such as seminars and workshops was hardly reported by health workers from senior health care professions.
Furthermore, a common set of core competencies would help provide a common language in which to discuss the practice of youth workers, the absence of which has been identified as an issue in the OST field (Madzey-Akale and Walker 2000).
