Healthy ageing is under pressure because extension of paid working lives is not feasible for a substantial group of workers. The overall aim of HEALTHPATH is to explain why some workers experience healthier pathways to retirement than others.
The aging population has led to the development of policies that promote healthy and economically productive aging. One such policy change involves raising the state pension age to encourage people to work for a longer period. However, this shift may have significant implications for the health of individuals who are required to work longer. One key reason for this is that the trend of extending working lives coincides with other factors that make it increasingly challenging for older workers to maintain both their physical and mental health as well as their job performance. This means that a growing number of workers will find it difficult to pursue a healthy pathway to retirement (HPTR), which we define as the ability of workers to reach their planned retirement ages while still maintaining their physical and mental well-being and job performance.
Furthermore, apart from workers, employers are also grappling with a labor market that is experiencing growing personnel shortages, particularly in crucial sectors like education and healthcare. At the sector level, various policies have been devised within collective labor agreements to bolster participation in paid work, and employers have introduced their own organizational-level policies with similar objectives. Previous research on the well-being of the working population has typically concentrated on either the organizational context or individual worker characteristics in isolation. However, there exists a research void concerning how these two aspects interact in achieving a healthy pathway to retirement (HPTR). Bridging this gap calls for an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from occupational epidemiology and sociology, along with the integration of data across sector, organizational, and individual worker levels within a single study.
The HEALTHPATH project aims to revolutionize our understanding of how society can support workers in achieving a healthy and high-performing retirement age. We have come to realize that the paths individuals take toward retirement are influenced by the interplay between their personal characteristics (such as health-related behavior, life events, and socioeconomic status) and the environment within their workplaces. This workplace environment is influenced by sector-wide policies and practices (such as those found in collective labor agreements) as well as employer-specific policies and practices (for example, encouraging employees to discuss their vulnerabilities with their managers or offering flexible work arrangements). The degree to which individual vulnerabilities affect a person's ability to attain a healthy pathway to retirement (HPTR) is significantly influenced by their specific workplace context.
HEALTHPATH will address the following key objectives (KOs):
KO1; To investigate how individual vulnerabilities and the organizational (employer & sectoral) context interact as determinants of HPTR of older workers.
KO2; To identify barriers and facilitators of implementing sector-based and employer-based policies and practices to support HPTR of individual workers.
HEALTHPATH entails a mixed methods study combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. For quantitative analyses, we will use longitudinal data from the existing NIDI Pension Panel study, and on a dataset that we will specifically construct for the purposes of this project: the HEALTHPATH longitudinal study. By using an interdisciplinary approach, we combine methods, theory and data from sociology and occupational health to understand why some workers do and others do not have a healthy pathway to retirement. Our multilevel design enables us to get a grip on interactions between sectors, employers and workers.
Contact person
Prof. Dr. Martijn Huisman, ma.huisman@amsterdamumc.nl
List of researchers
Prof. Dr. Martijn Huisman - Amsterdam UMC/VU Martijn Huisman
Dr. Mariska van der Horst – VU Mariska van der Horst
Dr. Anushiya Vanajan – VU
Prof. Dr. Cécile Boot - Amsterdam UMC Cécile Boot
Dr. Astrid de Wind - Amsterdam UMC Astrid de Wind
Dr. Astrid Bosma - Amsterdam UMC Astrid Bosma