Opinion|Reader’s opinion
Excessive workload after illness can worsen the symptoms of the illness and lead to prolonged sick leave. This could be prevented by modifying the work so that the patient can still cope with it as a convalescent.
Occupational health Professor Kari Reijula brought in its opinion paper (HS 25.4.) Highlighted important aspects of the role of occupational health care in terms of workers’ health and ability to work and the early detection of illness.
Helsingin Sanomat in the editorial (22.4.) It was suggested that occupational health care is more an activity that maintains the medical care of employees than an activity that maintains their ability to work. This would have accelerated the downsizing of public health care. If this is indeed the case, policymakers have misunderstood the role of occupational health care. Occupational health care has a special role to play in relation to illness and is not a substitute for the treatment of illness in public health care.
Every working age person gets sick sometimes. It can be an acute illness, such as a difficult infection from which full recovery can take weeks, even months. A person’s physical and physiological (such as circulatory and nervous system) as well as mental and cognitive ability to function and stretch return to pre-disease levels with a delay. The same goes for recovery from cancer treatments, surgery, accidents, or heart or brain attacks that have been successfully treated with leaching, to name a few.
During the recovery stages, patients often experience fatigue, depression, anxiety, fluctuations in alertness, sleep problems, and pain. A person’s ability to work and function has decreased for varying periods of time. People of working age also have chronic illnesses that need to be addressed, including at work.
Returning to work after sick leave is often a critical step. A workload that is too high for a patient to function again worsens the symptoms of the illness, leading to prolonged sick leave, even incapacity for work. This could have been prevented by modifying the work so that the patient can cope with it while still recovering or with their illness. The content of the work, the tools, the work environment, the pace of work, the working hours, the risks of accidents and the division of labor between different employees must be taken into account when tailoring the work. The role of occupational health care is to help the employee and the employer in this job customization.
The work promotes the rehabilitation of the disease when it is properly dimensioned. This requires up-to-date information on the nature of work in different professions and how transient or chronic illnesses affect a person’s ability to do their job. For this reason, it is important to take diseases into account in occupational health care.
The special task of occupational health care is to ensure that a convalescent or chronically ill person can manage to work in spite of everything, in order to avoid premature incapacity for work.
Kiti Müller
Docent of Neurology, University of Helsinki
Professor of Brain and Work at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health 2005–2014
The reader’s opinions are the speeches written by HS’s readers, selected and delivered by HS’s editorial staff. You can leave a comment or read the principles of writing at www.hs.fi/kirjtamielipidekirjoitus/.
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