Worker Productivity | Breast Cancer Evaluation Measures

Worker productivity measures for breast cancer screening^1-10

Healthier employees are less likely to call in sick. Companies can sometimes assess sick day use to determine whether health programs are increasing worker productivity.  

There is some evidence that women who receive false positive results (when a mammogram is judged to have positive findings of abnormalities when the true result is negative) for screening mammograms have an increased risk of anxiety and depression.⁴ This experience may affect productivity, and appropriate psychological support for these women should be available.

Baseline

• Determine the average number of sick days per employee over the previous 12 months related to breast cancer screening, diagnosis, or treatment 
  • This measure may be less useful if there has been a large increase or decrease in numbers of employees over the past 12 months
• Determine the costs for worker absenteeism including costs of replacement workers, costs in training replacement workers, and loss and delay in productivity
• Additional validated surveys have been developed to provide employers with information about the indirect costs of untreated or undertreated employee health issues such as breast cancer. Employers who use these health and productivity surveys on an ongoing basis can begin to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of offering breast cancer screening programs on employee absence or productivity. These surveys may be proprietary and may require a modest fee to use. Two examples are provided below: 
  • Health and Work Performance Questionnaire (HPQ) is a short, easy to administer self-report survey designed to estimate workplace indirect costs (absenteeism, reduced productivity, and injury due to accidents) of employee health problems developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Harvard Medical School
  • The Work Limitations Questionnaire (WLQ) developed by the Health Institute at Tufts Medical Center is an easy to use questionnaire that addresses general work limitations which can be built into other health assessment tools such as a health risk appraisal or employee health survey

Process

• Re-assess the average number of sick days per employee at the first follow-up evaluation 
  • If employee education programs are successful, these measures may increase in the short term as screening and detection rates increase
• Periodic repeats of other baseline measures

Outcome

• Assess changes in the average number of sick days per employee in repeated follow-up evaluations
• Assess changes in costs from baseline