Factors influencing return to work after rotator cuff surgery: A scoping review.

The authors did not check the quality of the 21 studies they included, and 12 of the 21 were retrospective, so what is listed here are associations reported by other researchers rather than findings this review tested. The evidence comes from only eight countries, ten of the 21 studies from the United States, and mostly from the northern hemisphere, so the picture may not hold where you work. Only articles in English or Spanish were included. Most studies recorded only whether the work was light or heavy, not what the job actually was, so the review says little about particular occupations such as drivers or health workers. Follow-up ranged from 6 months to more than 60 months and the review pooled return rates from different time points, so the 80.72% figure mixes workers checked at very different stages. The 21 studies were described and counted, not pooled statistically, so no combined estimate of any single factor's effect is available. No review protocol was published in advance. Workers' compensation status ranged from about 5% of a study sample to nearly 89%, so the groups being compared across studies are not alike.

The single author declared no financial support for the research, authorship or publication of the article, and no potential conflicts of interest.

Do not read the list of factors as a set of causes. This review maps 21 mostly retrospective studies that were never checked for quality, and the authors' own conclusion is that no single factor predicts whether a worker goes back. Workers' compensation is the clearest example: it appears in the table of negative factors, yet in this review those workers returned at rates and times similar to everyone else's.