Measuring Work-Related Psychosocial Factors Predicting Sickness Absence of Health Care Workers

Background: Work-related psychosocial factors (WRPFs), both risk and protective, play a relevant role in the development of health problems causing sickness absence (SA). The high rates of SA in health care workers (HCWs) lead to consequences on individuals, organizations, and society. While some regions legislated the duty of employers to consider WRPFs in their prevention plans, there is no consensus on which validated tools should be used to measure these factors. This systematic literature review has two objectives: 1) to list extant validated tools used to measure WRPFs predicting HCWs’ SA, and 2) to evaluate their quality based on their psychometric and practical properties. Method: This contribution is part of a larger PRISMA-compliant systematic literature review aimed at identifying the WRPFs that predict SA. Using the PsycINFO, Medline, and Web of Science online databases, the search first targeted prospective studies on WRPFs and SA published between 2012 and 2023. Then, the validated, self-report tools that yielded significant predictors (i.e., WRPFs) of SA in HCWs were identified. Next, an assessment of the properties, both psychometric (i.e., content validity, factorial validity, internal consistency, convergent validity, stability, and predictive validity of SA in HCWs) and practical (i.e., administration duration, ease of use, ease of interpretation, and availability in French or English), was performed following a rigorous method (Larivière et al., 2021; Gragnano et al., 2021; Villotti et al., 2021). The information reported in the included prospective studies and the validation studies of the tools was used to make the assessments. For each tool, the psychometric and practical properties were crossed, and an overall “excellent”, “good”, or “questionable” quality assessment was applied. Results: The search queries yielded 1087 records, 774 after duplicates, and 47 papers were fully read for eligibility. Based on inclusion criteria, 31 were included in the first step of the project, three of which focused on HCWs. In these studies, six tools that significantly predicted SA in HCWs were listed, namely, the Psychological demands and Social support scales of the Job Content Questionnaire (Karasek et al., 1998), the Decision authority and Social support scales of the Demands-Control-Support Questionnaire (Sanne et al., 2005), the Short Negative Acts Questionnaire (Notelaers et al., 2019), the Fair leadership scale of the General Nordic Questionnaire (Lindström et al., 1997), and the Managerial leadership scale of The Stress Profile (Setterlind et al., 1995). The overall quality was “excellent” for four tools, and “good” for three. Conclusion: In the context of SA prevention among HCWs, researchers and occupational health practitioners can use tools with “good” to “excellent” overall quality to measure traditional WRPFs that predict SA in HCWs. There is a need to develop and validate tools that measure WRPFs representing the specific characteristics of the health care working environment (e.g., ethical demands and social support from patients and their relatives). The Other WRPFs relevant to the work context of HCWs (e.g., human resource primacy and workplace violence) can be measured by extant tools that could be used in future research and program development and evaluation.