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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises’ Preferences for Occupational Health Services and Willingness to Pay

Authors : Mirella Cacace, Ingrid Franz, Daniel Braun-Beustrin, Dieter Ratz

Published in: Healthy at Work

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular benefit from occupational health services because these may help to reduce the potential costs of accidents or illnesses at work, support staff retention and recruitment, and decrease wage costs. Nevertheless, SMEs, especially microenterprises (<10 persons employed), rarely offer these services to their employees. The innovation incubator’s project “Healthy at Work” offers research-based advice to private service units to support SMEs to provide occupational health services in the region of Luneburg. This chapter describes how we use an Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis combined with a short willingness to pay (WTP) questionnaire to elicit SMEs’ preferences regarding occupational health services. We found that the optimal approach is to offer a comprehensive service package tailored to the needs of the individual company on a pay-per-use basis. The private supplier benefits from cooperation with a social insurance provider: either a health insurance fund or occupational accident insurer. Further, we found that employers are willing to pay for services. Within the group that is willing to pay, WTP increases with company size. It is therefore particularly important to offer appealing and affordable occupational health services to microenterprises, preferably in cooperation with social insurance providers.

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previous chapter “More than the Sum of Its Parts”: Demographic Change and the Future of Outpatient Nursing and Long-Term Care: Zukunft:Pflege (Future:Care) as an Example of Innovation Through Organizational Learning and Regional Network Development
next chapter Interpretive Patterns of Occupational Safety and Health: How Do They Affect Safety Organization and Health-Related Decisions of Enterprises? Basic Assumptions and First Impressions out of an Ongoing Project
Footnotes
1
These findings are in accordance with the observations made by Zelfel et al. (2011), who conducted a much larger study that surveyed 1441 SMEs all over Germany.
 
2
See, for example, reviews by Clark et al. (2014), De Bekker-Grob et al. (2012), Ryan and Farrar (2000), and Ratcliffe (2000).
 
3
According to German social legislation, the employer is obliged to offer occupational integration management (=Betriebliches Eingliederungsmanagement) to workers who have been absent because of sickness for more than 30 days/year. SMEs in particular are challenged by this obligation (Zelfel et al. 2011).
 
4
Both the “Healthy Workplace” and the TÜV award are fictitious.
 
5
See Sawtooth Software (2014) for a more detailed description of the procedure.
 
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Metadata
Title
Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises’ Preferences for Occupational Health Services and Willingness to Pay
Authors
Mirella Cacace
Ingrid Franz
Daniel Braun-Beustrin
Dieter Ratz
Copyright Year
2016
Book
Healthy at Work

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32329-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-32331-2

Copyright Year: 2016

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32331-2_16

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