Development and validation of sustainable employability index among older employees.

BACKGROUND: Sustainable employability (SE) has become an important factor for keeping people in the labour market and enabling the extension of working life. AIMS: We developed and validated an SE index to predict assured workability in 2 years. Additionally, we developed a scoring tool to use in practice. METHODS: A questionnaire survey of postal employees aged ≥50 years was conducted in 2016 and followed up in 2018 (n = 1102). The data were divided into training and validation sets. The outcome was defined as whether the employees had an assured workability after 2 years or not. Multivariable log-binomial regression was used to calculate the SE index. The area under the curve (AUC) was calculated to assess the discriminative power of the index. RESULTS: The probability of assured workability increased with increasing quintiles of the SE index. The highest quintiles of the SE index showed the highest observed and expected assured workability in 2 years. The predictive ability, area under the curve (AUC) for training was 0.79 (95% CI 0.75-0.83) and for validation data was 0.76 (95% CI 0.73-0.80). In the scoring tool, the self-rated health, workability, job satisfaction and perceived employment had the highest contribution to the index. CONCLUSIONS: The SE index was able to distinguish the employees based on whether they had assured workability after 2 years. The scoring method could be used to calculate the potentiality of future employability among late midlife postal employees.

Interpretative repertoires of medication among the oldest-old.

The use of medical drugs is not founded on medical knowledge alone, but it is also dependent on lay logic and reasoning. This study set out to explore the views of the oldest-old on their medication. The data for the study came from narrative interviews with people aged 90 or over. Our aim was to look for different culturally shared interpretative repertoires used by the interviewees as they gave descriptions and accounts of their drug use and presented themselves as users of medical drugs. Three interpretative repertoires were identified. The moral repertoire stressed lay people's moral norms and presented them as morally acceptable and responsible users of drugs by explaining and minimizing. The patient repertoire was used by the respondents to show they had accepted the role of patient. The self-help repertoire was used by the respondents to emphasize that they had made their own choices in medical care despite the biomedical facts. These repertoires showed that not only the biomedical logic, but also other logics are valid in the everyday world where most medical drugs are used. A better understanding of cultural ideas of drug use would help to improve the care of older people.