Discrepant Opinions About Cancer Among Employers and Employees

September 28, 2010

Christian McEvoy, MPH

Director, CT Challenge Survivorship Center

Survivorship is a huge issue. Sometimes, so I can get my mind around it, I try to divide survivorship into manageable pieces. For example, I divide the issues of survivorship into “medical issues” and “non-medical issues.” But as I’m writing this, I’m realizing how shortsighted this treatment is. Indeed this type of parsing and categorization is nonsensical because survivorship issues are so intertwined with each other. It’s not like a survivor’s financial problems are exclusively caused by one factor; life (and especially life with cancer) is not that simple, neat, or clean.

I was reminded of this (as I often am) when I read the analysis of a study conducted to better understand the reality that survivors face when they return to work after treatment. The study’ goal was to examine the attitudes of survivors and employers regarding cancer and its effect on work, productivity, and happiness in the workplace. To that end, the researchers constructed a questionnaire and gave it to survivors who had recently completed treatment and to unrelated executives at organizations. 82% of the survivors returned the questionnaires while only 31% of the organizational targets returned the questionnaires. The researchers reported, “Organizational respondents consistently reported more negative beliefs about the impact of cancer and treatment on work and in general held more negative illness perceptions about cancer in relation to work.”

My first thought was – this is horrible; employers seem to think cancer is worse than it actually is. But then I realized that my initial conclusion is not the real message of this survey. This survey really tells us that there is a discrepancy between what employers think and what survivor-employees think. It really doesn’t matter who seems to think the situation is worse or better. What matters is that employers and employees are not dealing with same problem. In other words, the solution to the problem this study suggests is not to educate employers but rather to encourage communication between employees and employers.

I imagine this type of discrepancy is present throughout survivorship. I wonder how many survivor-families have discrepant opinions about the nature of the challenges they mutually face? I guess the only way to find out if you have discrepancies in opinion among your family is to…well….talk about it.

Reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20855546?dopt=Abstract

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