Determining the level and cost of sickness presenteeism among hospital staff in Turkey

This study aimed to determine the associations between sickness presenteeism and socio-demographic factors, perceived health status and health complaints among hospital staff and to calculate the cost burdens and productivity losses attributed to presenteeism.

A cross-sectional study was conducted using 951 hospital staff, including physicians, nurses, midwives, other health personnel and administrative staff working in two hospitals located in Kırıkkale province in Turkey. The health and work performance questionnaire developed by Kessler et al. was revised to measure sickness presenteeism.

After performing Student's t test and a one-way analysis of variance, presenteeism was mostly observed in women, nurse-midwives, young employees, university health staff and health workers with low health status. Average productivity loss and cost of lost productivity per staff member were calculated as 19.92 h/TRY 315.57 for 2 weeks and 478.08 h/TRY 7573.68 for 1 year.

The problem of sickness presenteeism is mostly observed in women and nurses. It causes both financial burdens and productivity losses for hospitals. These survey results are thus expected to provide critically important information on presenteeism for decision-makers and healthcare managers.