Detailled Information

Kessler, R.C., Barber, C., Beck, A.L., Berglund, P.A., Cleary, P.D., McKenas, D., Pronk, N.P., Simon, G.E., Stang, P.E., Üstün, T.B., Wang, P.S. (2003). The World Health Organization Health and Work Performance Questionnaire (HPQ). Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 45 (2), 156-174.

Evaluation of the construct validity and scoring methods of the HPQ for patients with arthritis.

This report presents an overview of methodological issues in estimating the indirect workplace costs of illness from data obtained in employee surveys using the HPQ.

Prospective study assessing relationship between presenteeism and depresion in a Japanese cohort. More sickness presenteeism scores were found to be related to higher rates of depression due to mental disease.

Reliability and validity of Persian version of World Health Organization health and work performance questionnaire in Iranian health care workers.

http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/hpq/info.php

The HPQ contains questions about absenteeism, quality and quantity of work while on the job (often referred to as “presenteeism”), and critical incidents on the job.

The HPQ survey have separate short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals. The short-term goal is to provide information to employers about the indirect costs of untreated and undertreated employee health problems. The intermediate goal of the HPQ survey is to help employers evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of new investment decisions regarding employee health benefits and programs. The long-term goal is to provide ongoing quality assurance once test market studies have shown that changes in employee health benefits have a positive ROI.

The developers of the HPQ reference two methods of scoring, relative and absolute. The relative score is obtained from a ratio between the persons’ perception of how they are performing at work compared with others, while the absolute score is a percentage obtained from the person’s perception of how they performed at work in the past 4 weeks. The developers of the HPQ did not specify whether the relative or absolute scoring methods should be used, or if one is more meaningful or superior in explaining the HPQ’s ability to assess work functioning.

Absolute presenteeism has a lower bound of 0 (total lack of performance during time on the job) and an upper bound of 100 (no lack of performance during time on the job). Absenteeism is scored in terms of hours lost per month, which is to say that a high score indicates a higher amount of absenteeism. The measure of absolute absenteeism is expressed in raw hours, with a negative lower bound (if the person works more than expected) and an upper bound equal to the number of hours the respondent is expected to work. The measure of relative absenteeism is expressed as a percentage of expected hours and ranges between a negative number (works more than expected) and 1.0 (always absent).

The relative score is a ratio between how the person performed in the last week compared with how other workers perform. The relative score has a restricted range between 0.25 and 2.0 (0.25 worst relative performance or 25% less of other workers’ performance).

Includes decomposition questions (asking series of questions before asking person to score on a scale) and internal anchoring (set down anchor and compare own recent performance with that of average worker on the same job using a 7-point scale;

Different versions are available: e.g. Health at Work Survey (= HPQ Employee version)

HPQ Clinical trails 7-Day Version; HPQ Clinical Trials 28-day version; those can be downloaded at http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/hpq/info.php