O-357 Examining variations in work disability duration by firm size: a comparative study of workers’ compensation claims in Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Small firms, while more numerous than large firms, often face greater challenges in implementing effective occupational health and safety and return-to-work programs. Research has rarely looked at firm size as a determinant of work disability duration and has been limited to single jurisdictions. Objectives To identify whether there were differences in work disability duration between injured workers employed by small, medium and large firms and whether these differences varied between workers’ compensation jurisdictions in Canada (CAN) and Australia (AUS). Methods Workers’ compensation data were used to identify comparable lost-time, work-related injury and musculoskeletal disorder claims in five Canadian and five Australian jurisdictions between 2011 and 2015. Work disability duration was measured using cumulative days in receipt of disability benefit payments up to one-year post-injury. Jurisdiction-specific quantile regression models were used to compare cumulative disability days paid from small ( < 2 0 full-time equivalents (FTEs), medium (20–199 FTEs), large (200+ FTEs) firms at 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles in the disability distribution, adjusting for confounders. Results Differences in work disability duration by firm size were observed in all jurisdictions except the Northern Territories (AUS). Compared to large firms, small firms were paid the most disability days at each percentile, particunarly in Victoria (AUS), Saskatchewan (CAN), the Australian Capital Territory, and Tasmania (AUS), where an additional 63.0, 31.1, 37.0, and 27.4 days were paid at the 75th percentiles of the distributions, respectively. Claims from medium-sized firms were generally paid more disability days than large firms except in Western Australia and Tasmania, where they were paid less. Conclusions Small firms were shown to have the longest work disability durations in 9 of the 10 study jurisdictions. Claims management processes need to be sensitive to the challenges that small firms face in accommodating and returning injured workers back to work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".