Factors Influencing Return to Work Among Women With Acquired Brain Injury.

Everyone was recruited from the vocational rehabilitation units of two tertiary hospitals, where patients are usually taken on because they have a vocational goal. That likely selects women who were already motivated to work, and the authors say the high return rate may not reflect women with acquired brain injury more widely. Most interviews were done by telephone because few eligible women attended on the clinic dates. The authors say this limited response time and may have affected the answers. Seventeen questionnaires were incomplete and those women were left out of the analysis, so the findings rest on 139 of the 177 women who agreed to take part. The survey was completed once. It shows what goes together with returning to work, not what causes it. Cognitive, perceptual, physical and emotional difficulties were combined into one yes-or-no category, so the study cannot say whether some kinds of impairment matter more than others. Nothing was collected about the type of jobs the women returned to or how long those jobs lasted, and the authors say including informal and self-employment in the definition may itself have affected the return rate.

Do not read the fivefold workplace support result as proof that changing a manager's behaviour will get women back to work. The comparison was between women supported by managers and women supported by family and friends, not between support and no support, and this was a single survey taken at one point in time, so it can show an association but not cause and effect.