Role of the occupational health services as a part of illness-related primary care in Finland

Abstract

The aim of the study was to evaluate the employees' illness-related utilization of physicians' services in Finland with special reference to Occupational Health Services (OHS). The data are based on a national health-survey conducted by a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) in autumn 1991. There were 1,856 people aged 25-64 interviewed. The "risk" of having visited a physician in six months was in association with perceived chronic illness and gender. Half of those employees who were covered by OHS (90% of all) usually visited their OHS unit for health problems. The potential use of the OHS unit depended on the OHS model. The study shows that the Finnish employees use OHS units for physicians' services a lot and this might have implications in the planned reorganization of the Finnish primary care to the so-called population responsibility-based system.