Effect of Worksite Health Promotion Programs on Employee Absenteeism

Employee absenteeism is an important economic variable that needs to be examined by occupational health nurses when evaluating worksite health promotion programs. Two of the three Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plan studies suggested that their programs acted to contain absenteeism among program participants. The worksite programs that met with success tended to be comprehensive and to have strong management support. Strengths of the three studies included the use of comparison groups and pretest measures of absenteeism in the analyses. Limitations included selection bias, subject dropout over time, limited monitoring of the program process, and the use of an analysis method that did not consider the statistical characteristics of the absenteeism variable.