Are Durations Changing Over Time?
Return-to-work durations are an important benchmark in an employee’s leave process that reflect more than just recovery time. They also represent the timeliness and effectiveness of healthcare, workplace expectations and accommodations, societal barriers and conditions, and more.
Leave requests are on the rise overall, with 57% of organizations reporting that more workers requested extended periods of time off in 2024. In particular, the number of mental health-related leaves of absence has increased 300% since 2017. In the first quarter of 2024, more Americans took a leaves of absence for mental health reasons than accidents, cancer, heart disease, and heart attacks combined.
There may have been more leave requests, but have the lengths of those absences have grown? To find out, we looked at condition means using MDGuidelines’ dataset of 26 million claims from 2013 to 2022 to see how they changed over time.
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