10 Chronic diseases (continued)
10.2 Influence of chronic diseases on participation (continued)
| Percentage of those with a given condition who also report having another condition | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epilepsy | Liver | Cancer | Ulcer | Heart | High blood | |
| Epilepsy | 35 | 18 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| Liver | 23 | 23 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
| Cancer | 6 | 17 | 50 | 11 | 10 | 7 |
| Ulcer | 23 | 15 | 10 | 49 | 8 | 5 |
| Heart | 25 | 29 | 25 | 24 | 39 | 25 |
| High blood | 30 | 69 | 39 | 34 | 54 | 67 |
Note:
The bold numbers on the diagonal refer to those who report solely having the given condition.
10.3 Assessing the impact on the total labour supply of older workers
While it is important to identify which diseases have significant marginal effects, a more complete picture of the effect of the disease on the overall level of the labour force requires that we allow for the prevalence of the disease. A disease could have a very debilitating effect leading to a massive drop in labour force participation amongst the afflicted, but the number of sufferers could be very small.
For each of the significant diseases identified in Table 10-4, the marginal effects were weighted by the estimated number of sufferers. This latter number was obtained by using the observed prevalence in the HWR survey multiplied by the marginal percentage. The results are summarised in Figure 22; for example, for males, cancer (other than skin cancer) and heart problems reduce the labour force population by 1,600 each. Note that this does not take any possible correlations into account, as some people report multiple conditions.
- Figure 22: Impact of chronic illnesses on labour force participation
