IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0182510.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Estimation of sickness absenteeism among Italian healthcare workers during seasonal influenza epidemics

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Michela Gianino
  • Gianfranco Politano
  • Antonio Scarmozzino
  • Lorena Charrier
  • Marco Testa
  • Sebastian Giacomelli
  • Alfredo Benso
  • Carla Maria Zotti

Abstract

Objectives: To analyze absenteeism among healthcare workers (HCWs) at a large Italian hospital and to estimate the increase in absenteeism that occurred during seasonal flu periods. Design: Retrospective observational study. Methods: The absenteeism data were divided into three “epidemic periods,” starting at week 42 of one year and terminating at week 17 of the following year (2010–2011, 2011–2012, 2012–2013), and three “non-epidemic periods,” defined as week 18 to week 41 and used as baseline data. The excess of the absenteeism occurring among HCWs during periods of epidemic influenza in comparison with baseline was estimated. All data, obtained from Hospital’s databases, were collected for each of the following six job categories: medical doctors, technical executives (i.e., pharmacists), nurses and allied health professionals (i.e., radiographers), other executives (i.e., engineers), nonmedical support staff, and administrative staff. The HCWs were classified by: in and no-contact; vaccinated and unvaccinated. Results: 5,544, 5,369, and 5,291 workers in three years were studied. The average duration of absenteeism during the epidemic periods increased among all employees by +2.07 days/person (from 2.99 to 5.06), and the relative increase ranged from 64–94% among the different job categories. Workers not in contact with patients experienced a slightly greater increase in absenteeism (+2.28 days/person, from 2.73 to 5.01) than did employees in contact with patients (+2.04, from 3.04 to 5.08). The vaccination rate among HCWs was below 3%, however the higher excess of absenteeism rate among unvaccinated in comparison with vaccinated workers was observed during the epidemic periods (2.09 vs 1.45 days/person). Conclusion: The influenza-related absenteeism during epidemic periods was quantified as totaling more than 11,000 days/year at the Italian hospital studied. This result confirms the economic impact of sick leave on healthcare systems and stresses on the necessity of encouraging HCWs to be immunized against influenza.

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Michela Gianino & Gianfranco Politano & Antonio Scarmozzino & Lorena Charrier & Marco Testa & Sebastian Giacomelli & Alfredo Benso & Carla Maria Zotti, 2017. "Estimation of sickness absenteeism among Italian healthcare workers during seasonal influenza epidemics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(8), pages 1-12, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0182510
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182510
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182510
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182510&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0182510?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maria Michela Gianino & Gianfranco Politano & Antonio Scarmozzino & Michela Stillo & Viola Amprino & Stefano Di Carlo & Alfredo Benso & Carla Maria Zotti, 2019. "Cost of Sickness Absenteeism during Seasonal Influenza Outbreaks of Medium Intensity among Health Care Workers," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(5), pages 1-11, March.
    2. Vittoria Colamesta & Andrea Tamburrano & Andrea Barbara & Andrea Gentili & Daniele Ignazio La Milia & Filippo Berloco & Americo Cicchetti & Daniele Piacentini & Roberta Galluzzi & Sergio Riccardo Mast, 2019. "Cost-consequence analysis of influenza vaccination among the staff of a large teaching hospital in Rome, Italy: A pilot study," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(11), pages 1-9, November.
    3. Adriano Dias & João Marcos Bernardes & Miriam Malacize Fantazia & Carlos Ruiz-Frutos & Juan Gómez-Salgado, 2018. "Six Years of Sick Leave Spells in a Group of University Civil Workers. Can Modern Work Bring Them a New Health Problem?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-14, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0182510. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.