Does provision of targeted health care for the unemployed enhance re-employment?

Background: There is increasing pressure to develop services to enhance the health of the workforce on the periphery of the labour market. Health promotion among unemployed people may improve their health but also to increase their employability. We tested whether re-employment can be enhanced with a health care intervention targeted at the unemployed.

My health and theirs: clients constructing meanings for a health service programme for unemployed people.

Health care research has been more interested in identifying reasons why people do not participate in health interventions than in trying to understand the reasons why they do. This study examined how unemployed people position themselves with regard to a new health service which was set up as part of an institutional strategy for delivering and enabling their access to health care. Positioning theory was used as a methodological framework to analyse participants' responses to the novel health service.

Fixed-term work and violence at work.

Objectives: This study investigated the effect of a fixed-term job contract on encounters of violence at work. We assumed that fixed-term employees encountered more violence or threats of violence at their work than permanent employees.

Methods: This study is based on 3 large statistical data sets: (a) the Work and Health surveys carried out by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in 1997-2006 (n=7,519); (b) the so-called Victim study carried out by Statistics Finland in 2006, where 4088 working people were interviewed about victimization resulting in injuries and violence; and (c) another study from Statistics Finland, which interviewed 4 392 wage-earners about their working conditions in 2008.

Encounters with unemployment in occupational health care: Nurses' constructions of clients without work.

This study explores occupational health nurses' encounters with unemployed clients in Finland. It involved setting up and evaluating a new service, Career Health Care, that resembled occupational health care, except that clients were recruited from among job seekers who were participating in one of three active labour market policy measures: vocational training, subsidised employment in the public sector, or participatory training for entering the labour market. Our main interest focused on nurses' perceptions of the unemployed and their professional practices in the context of Career Health Care.

Is fixed-term employment a new risk for adverse physical working conditions?

Relationships between employment type and the physical work environment were studied among blue-collar workers (n = 1,127). Based on survey data, we set out to compare the evaluations of environmental load and physical strain at work given by fixed-term (17% of all) and permanent workers. The type of employment was not related to environmental load.