Does a working day keep the doctor away? A critical review of the impact of unemployment and job insecurity on health and social care utilisation

Keyi Li, Paula Lorgelly, Sarah Jasim, Tiyi Morris and Manuel Gomes

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: While the negative impact of unemployment on health is relatively well established, the extent to which that impact reflects on changes in health and social care utilisation is not well understood. This paper critically reviews the direction, magnitude and drivers of the impact of unemployment and job insecurity on health and social care utilisation across different care settings. We identified 28 relevant studies, which included 79 estimates of association between unemployment/job insecurity and healthcare utilisation. Positive associations dominated mental health services (N = 8 out of 11), but not necessarily primary care (N = 25 out of 43) or hospital care (N = 5 out of 22). We conducted a meta-analysis to summarise the magnitude of the impact and found that unemployed individuals were about 30% more likely to use health services compared to those employed, although this was largely driven by mental health service use. Key driving factors included financial pressure, health insurance, social network, disposable time and depression/anxiety. This review suggests that unemployment is likely to be associated with increased mental health service use, but there is considerable uncertainty around primary and hospital care utilisation. Future work to examine the impact across other settings, including community and social care, and further explore non-health determinants of utilisation is needed. The protocol was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42020177668).

Keywords: health care utilisation; health service use; job insecurity; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2023-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in European Journal of Health Economics, 1, March, 2023, 24(2), pp. 179 - 186. ISSN: 1618-7598

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115164/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does a working day keep the doctor away? A critical review of the impact of unemployment and job insecurity on health and social care utilisation (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:115164

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().