Impact of COVID on the medical activity of occupational health departments

Abstract

Background
To determine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the number of occupational health consultations and to highlight influencing factors.

Method
Retrospective observational study of consultations from an inter-company occupational health service. Data were retrieved during three consecutive years: 2019 (baseline), and 2020–2021. For comparisons purposes, we used the number of occupational health consultations per day and per full-time equivalent occupational healthcare worker (n consultations/d/FTE). Multivariate analysis was performed using logistic regression, for each lockdown vs the same period one year before.

Results
A total of 103,351 consultations were included. The number of consultations decreased by 14.3% in 2020 compared to 2019 but increased by 33.7% in 2021 compared to 2020. There were 4.9 consultations/d/FTE, 4.69 to 5.12 in 2019; 4.07, 3.81 to 4.34 in 2020; and 5.35, 5.16 to 5.55 in 2021. The first lockdown had a massive impact on the number of consultations, whereas the activity returned to normal from August 2020 with an increase in 2021. Age was associated with a decrease in the propension of consulting for the three lockdown periods (p < 0.001). The proportion of consultations for return-to-work was multiplied by 2.44 (2.02 to 2.95, p < 0.001) during the first lockdown, associated with a reduced risk of being declared unfit to work (OR = 0.48, 95 CI 0.27 to 0.84, p = 0.010).

Conclusion
The Covid-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the medical activity of occupational health departments, with a massive decrease in 2020 followed by an increase in 2021 compared to 2019.

Rights

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323018

Repository URI

https://research-portal.uws.ac.uk/en/publications/1adf64f7-4c9d-43ca-a86b-2c2af5d25e4d