Low coworker social-support increases days of sickness-absenteeism and it operates as an effect modifier in south Brazilian hospital workers
METHODS: This is a case-control study nested in a cohort of hospital workers followed up between 07/01/2008 and 06/01/2009. Workers with HTL in this period were selected as cases, and controls were those without it. They matched sex, age and working sector, which resulted in a case-control group, with at least one case and one or more controls. Two eligibility criteria were used. First, participant had to start working in a SES/SC hospital unit at most 07/01/2005. Second, the last HTL most have finished until 07/01/2007. HTL duration in days was the outcome, JDC and supervisor and coworker social-support were the exposure variables, these associations were adjusted by socioeconomic and occupational variables. Exposure variables were collected using a questionnaire applied from March to August 2010, the other variables were secondary data. Regression analysis was performed by zero-inflated negative binomial.
RESULTS: Data bank used for analysis included 425 participants (144 cases; 281 controls). Low coworker social-support increased HTL duration 2,04 (CI95%: 1,05-3,93) times compared to the workers with high coworker support, and it modified the effect of low job strain to 2,68 (CI95%: 1,37-5,27) times and high job strain to 1,78 (CI95%: 1,02-3,12) times, both combination were more than any JDC category combined with high coworker support.
CONCLUSIONS: Low coworker social-support in this study shows to be an essential condition to increase sickness-absenteeism, and it also modified the effect of high strain tasks and low ones. It is not usual to find low strain tasks associated with sickness-absenteeism.