© 2002 Occupational and Environmental Medicine
LETTER
Sickness absence in doctors
1 Department of Occupational Medicine, Royal Berkshire and Battle Hospitals NHS Trust, West Berkshire Occupational Health, 21 Craven Road, Reading, Berkshire RG1 5LE, UK; ianjmurphy@doctors.org.uk
Keywords: doctors; sickness absence
Kivimaki et al 1 undertook research to identify some determinants of sickness absence in Finnish hospital physicians between 1997 and 1998. This was a questionnaire survey sent to 816 physicians and a control group of 542 senior nurses employed in one of 11 hospitals in Finland. Social circumstances, work characteristics, and various measures of health were assessed by questionnaire and employers' registers were used to assess recorded sickness absence.
There are some limitations in the study design and subsequent conclusions that are not acknowledged in the text.
The response rate from the physicians was a disappointing 55%. Nearly half of the physicians approached did not participate in the study. This could bias the results considerably. The authors state that the response rate obtained in this study corresponds to that obtained in previous research. Seven references are cited as evidence. The response rates of doctors from six of the seven quoted papers
2 Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- Citation Map
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
