The effect of hospital mergers on long-term sickness absence among hospital employees: a fixed effects multivariate regression analysis using panel data

Table 2 Odds ratios of long-term sickness absence before and after hospital mergers

	OR	S.E.
Non-merger years during 2000-2008	1	-
Year 0	1.05	0.02	**
Year 1	1.02	0.02
Year 2	1.04	0.02	*
Year 3	1.07	0.02	***
Year 4	1.09	0.02	***
Year 5	1.04	0.02
Year-specific variable		Yes
Legislation-specific variable		Yes

Note. The Table presents the employees’ odds ratio of entering long-term sickness absence each year from the year prior to reporting as one merged hospital to 5 years after the merger. The analyses were done with fixed effects so that each employee’s odds during the merger years were compared with the same employee’s odds the years prior to and after the merger years within the study period, 2000–2008 (baseline).
N employees: 47,485; N employee-years: 292,990.
*p < 0.05 **p < 0.01 ***p < 0.001.

ISSN: 1472-6963