Skip to main content
Top

27-10-2017 | Pediatric and adolescent cancers | News

News in brief

‘Job lock’ common in childhood cancer survivors

print
PRINT
insite
SEARCH

medwireNews: A North American survey finds that around a quarter of long-term survivors of childhood cancers are likely to remain in the same job in order to maintain work-related health insurance.

This so-called “job lock” could “affect career trajectory, diminish potential earning power, and ultimately impact quality of life,” the researchers write in JAMA Oncology.

They identified 394 cancer survivors and 128 siblings of survivors from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study cohort, all of whom were employed full-time, and found that 23.2% of survivors reported job lock, compared with 16.9% of the siblings, although the difference was not statistically significant.

Survivors were significantly more likely to report job lock if they had previously been denied insurance (relative risk [RR]=1.60), were female (RR=1.70), had a severe, disabling, or life-threatening condition (RR=1.72), or had problems paying medical bills (RR=2.43).

Anne Kirchhoff, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, USA, and co-authors say that concerns among survivors about insurance are likely to increase in light of the proposed changes to the US Affordable Care Act (ACA).

And they conclude: “Future research should investigate how ACA modifications affect relationships among childhood cancer survivors’ health status, their employment decisions, their insurance access, and their income, and how these factors influence their quality of health care.”

By Shreeya Nanda

medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare. © 2017 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group

print
PRINT