Missed Opportunities? Sick leave follow-up among immigrants - trajectories, barriers and pathways back to work

Immigrants are overrepresented in occupations with high physical and psychosocial demands, and refugees have a high share of long-term sick leave. At the same time, knowledge about how sick leave follow-up works for this group is limited. The project therefore takes the sick leave trajectory as a whole as its starting point, from sick-leave notification through follow-up during the absence to return to work or permanent exit from working life.

The project has four work packages.

• WP1 is a register-based analysis of long-term sick leave over several years. It links data from Statistics Norway (SSB) with health data from the Municipal Patient and User Register and the Norwegian Patient Register, and compares immigrants with Norwegian-born workers in similar occupations. The unit of analysis is the individual sick-leave spell, and the analysis shows where in the trajectory the risk of exit is highest, by immigrant group, sex, occupation and diagnosis.
• WP2–WP4 are qualitative interview studies with Nav caseworkers, sick-listed immigrants and employers, and they are based on concrete follow-up trajectories.