In the occupational health setting, more attention for illness perceptions by health professionals seems therefore sensible. Many health professionals are unaware of the relevance of discussing patient’s illness representations or strategies patients adopt to deal with their illness. At the same time, patients do not often spontaneously articulate these issues if they are not encouraged to do so. Discussing illness perceptions

is appreciated by patients and create a feeling of support (Theunissen et al. 2003). Preventative actions can be taken by an occupational professional for a worker who is at risk of dropping out with an illness. This could include offering more positive Akt inhibitor views about the illness and possibilities to work, provide ability to vent emotions, encourage social support and communication with the supervisor, and train problem-focused coping at work. Identifying

which patients develop maladaptive illness representations would be helpful for health professionals. It seems sensible to target interventions by (occupational) health professionals to (patterns of) maladaptive illness representations. For example, if patients have unhelpful perceptions regarding the consequences of their illness than the aim could be to help the patient understand these and filter out any unrealistic scenario’s. The same applies when patients have unrealistic perceptions of the chronic or recurrent timeline of their illness, or work participation is unnecessarily postponed as only the negative

consequences of work are considered by the patient. Selleckchem 10058-F4 Also, providing information on occupational interventions Urease or job accommodations could empower a patient to keep working with a chronic disease and boost the patient’s perception to control the negative effects of the illness while at work. The above would require the health professional to have an adequate knowledge of the effects that different illnesses have on functioning or more specific work participation, and more importantly, how any of these cognitive or emotional representations can be accommodated for or trained by the worker. This would require skills in cognitive and behavioral therapy, which may be feasible as shown in the Theunissen et al. (2003) who provided GP trainees with a short (6 h) training in these principles. Other promising vocational rehabilitation strategies are increasingly used in the occupational health field (Hoving et al. 2009; Verbeek 2006) and would benefit from including the PF-6463922 cell line concept of illness perceptions. The use of illness perception measures by health professionals would also target specific interventions to those who need it, in contrast to offering the same treatment to everyone, and would be a potential cost-effective option.