Hospital Employee Health: Fitness, Absenteeism and Accidents. Final Report

摘要

The purpose of the study was to test data collection procedures and measures for subsequent use in multivariate studies turgid at explaining the impact of cardiovascular fitness on hospital workers' absenteeism, accident incidence and health care utilization at a large midwestern university hospital. Important findings include the classification of work injuries by type and body part affected as well as by job and work environment variables. The development and definitive performance of a log-transformed absence measure will overcome the traditional problems of statistical inference and estimation in future studies. A classification of health care claims is proposed which considers the sensitivity of the health problem to physical activity/inactivity. Finally the variance of both self-report and physiological measures of fitness across demographic and psychosocial variables is demonstrated. Future studies are warranted to validate and expand the findings of the pilot study. Larger sample sizes with sophisticated multilevel stratification are needed to definitively advance explanations of the role of fitness in the workplace.