Prof. Dr. med. Regina Kunz

There are some anecdotic reports that claimants for disability benefits sometimes consider themselves unfairly treated during work disability evaluations. In such cases, claimants might miss an atmosphere of trust and respect or the medical expert might not let them finish talking. Perceived fairness has yet not been systematically studied in Swiss work disability evaluations. For this purpose, we developed the Basel Fairness Questionnaire (BFQ). In a first study on 305 claimants, we found that only few of them perceived the work disability evaluation as unfair. However, this initial finding needs to be interpreted with some caution, as only 4 out of 29 Swiss assessment centers participated in the study. For future studies, we plan to compare mono-, bi-, and polydisciplinary work disability evaluations, as well as different medical disciplines.

The field was established in 2015 to help decision-makers and professionals in a medical insurance context to make evidence-informed decisions. Insurance medicine makes health-related judgments on diagnosis, prognosis and effectiveness of interventions in the context of insurance coverage.

Expert psychiatrists conducting work disability evaluations often disagree on work capacity (WC) when assessing the same patient. More structured and standardised evaluations focusing on function could improve agreement. The RELY studies aimed to establish the inter-rater reproducibility (reliability and agreement) of ‘functional evaluations’ in patients with mental disorders applying for disability benefits and to compare the effect of limited versus intensive expert training on reproducibility.