Supporting work participation of people with a chronic disease

Work participation can be difficult when having a chronic disease, through experienced limitations of the condition in work. Aspects and interventions are found to influence people’s participation in work, of which most are experienced irrespective of the specific diagnosis. Since knowledge on these aspects and interventions can support occupational health professionals in their guidance and assessment, this thesis first aimed to obtain available evidence on which aspects and interventions influence participation in work of people with a chronic disease, irrespective of their diagnosis. The evidence was included in a guideline to provide an clear overview of the information for occupational health professionals.
Thereafter, in our second aim, we explored how to increase the use of the guideline by occupational health professionals, so that guidance and assessment of people with a chronic disease in their work participation, would be optimized. Therefore, we developed and evaluated a training programme in which knowledge and skills were provided to occupational health professionals to increase their capability to use the guideline. The training programme was found to be a feasible approach according to occupational health professionals, and showed an increase in the knowledge of occupational health professionals of the content of the guideline.