Treating depressed workers boosts productivity, retention: study

Last Updated: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 | 5:24 PM ET

CBC News

Taking care of depressed employees through screening and enhanced-care programs may be financially beneficial to employers, finds a new study.

The study, "Enhanced Depression Treatment and Work Outcomes," in the Sept. 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), finds that outreach programs that screened depressed employees and pointed them to psychotherapy and/or medication for their condition led to improved productivity, greater staff retention and happier staff members.

Outreach programs that screened depressed employees and pointed them to psychotherapy and/or medication led to improved productivity, greater staff retention and happier staff members, says the study.
(CBC)

According to the Mood Disorders Society of Canada, approximately eight per cent of adults will experience major depression at some time in their lives.

Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Md., conducted a two-part randomized controlled trial involving 604 employees covered by a managed behavioural health plan; 304 employees were enrolled in the enhanced care program while 300 received the program's usual care.

Those employees who refused to enter treatment were offered structured cognitive behavioral psychotherapy exclusively via telephone.

'Outreach and enhanced care for depressed workers might be better conceptualized as an opportunity to invest in improving the productive capacity of workforces than as workplace costs.'—Study's authors

Employees in both groups were assessed at six-month and 12-month intervals on their job retention, time missed from work and their work performance.

Boost to clinical, workplace outcomes

Those who received the enhanced outreach and care management program were more likely to recover from their depression at the 12-month mark (26.2 per cent versus 17.7 per cent).

Employees in the telephonic program also worked more hours when assessed at six and 12 months, working an average of two more hours per week than workers in the usual care group, which, the authors say, is equivalent to an annualized effect of more than two weeks of work.

This overall effect was due to a higher rate of job retention (92.6 per cent versus 88.0 per cent) in the enhanced care group, according to the study.

"The results suggest that enhanced depression care of workers has benefits not only on clinical outcomes but also on workplace outcomes," reads the study.

"The financial value of the latter to employers in terms of recovered hiring, training, and salary costs suggests that many employers would experience a positive return on investment from outreach and enhanced treatment of depressed workers."

Return on investment

The study's authors acknowledge that calculating the impact of improved productivity and higher retention on a company's bottom line is tricky. But they speculate that if two weeks of extra work of each participant in an enhanced care program leads to an approximate figure of $1,800 in profit, then companies paying $100 to $400 in outreach and care management costs associated with low to moderate intensity interventions would be farther ahead financially than if they were not to implement these types of programs.

"Outreach and enhanced care for depressed workers might be better conceptualized as an opportunity to invest in improving the productive capacity of workforces than as workplace costs," says the study.

Bill Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO, Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health, told CBCNews.ca Tuesday that Canadian companies have been slow to implement depression programs in their workplaces. But he feels the JAMA study is a great way of presenting them with the financial evidence they're looking for.

"I think what we're seeing is an accumulation of anecdotal evidence which is finally infiltrating both the instinctual business judgement of the executive and secondly, there is sufficient evidence now that there is a dollar cash return for every dollar spent to promote the mental health of employees."

The only thing that hasn't been proven, he says, is "how we can do that in say, two years or three years rather than vaguely sometime: a concrete timeline that will be a manageable return on investment."

"Based upon this kind of evidence, this will encourage employers to invest in research that will advance the quality of care that will bring us closer to the day when we can find a solution to preventing the onset of these illnesses," says Wilkerson.