Table 2 Overview of themes and subthemes

Barriers to provide support

 1. Negative organizational attitudes towards employees with chronic conditions

  • Not wanting to retain employees with chronic conditions and contribute to their sustainable employment

  • Employers’ financial considerations and fear of high costs

  • Employers’ mistrust and co-workers’ jealousy towards needed accommodations

 2. Employees’ reluctance to collaborate with employers in dealing with work-related problems

  • Employees’ non-disclosure of their chronic condition

  • Employees’ lack of cooperation

 3. Lack of skills and knowledge of how to support employees with chronic conditions

  • Employers’ lack of knowledge of rules and regulations

  • Too much medicalization of support

 4. Suboptimal collaboration between OPs and organizational representatives

  • Not meeting each other’s expectations in terms of performance

  • Questioning OPs’ objectivity

  • Impeded communication due to privacy legislation

 5. Lack of utilization of OPs’ support

  • Employers and employees fail to seek preventive support from OPs

  • Employers do not refer employees to preventive consultation hours

 6. OPs’ lack of visibility

  • Employees’ unawareness of the availability of support from OPs

  • The distance between OPs and organizations

 7. OPs’ lack of time and capacity for prevention

  • Too much time is spent on reducing sickness absence rather than on prevention

  • Shortage of OPs

Opportunities to improve support

 8. Shared responsibility of all stakeholders involved to prevent work-related problems

 9. Actively anchoring prevention of work-related problems in policy and practice

  • Proactive prioritizing prevention in occupational health care

  • Creating a supportive work environment and developing organizational policy

 10. Increasing the role of the health care sector in the prevention of work-related problems