Indirect costs and incidence of caregivers’ short-term absenteeism in Poland, 2006–2016

BACKGROUND: There is a growing interest in the costs of informal care; however, the results of previous studies mostly rely on self-reported data, which is subject to numerous biases. The aim of this study is to contribute to the topic by estimating the indirect costs of short-term absenteeism associated with informal caregiving in Poland with the use of social insurance data on care absence incidence. METHODS: The human capital method was used to estimate the indirect costs of caregiving from a societal perspective. The incidence of caregiving was identified based on the Social Insurance Institution’s data on absence days attributable to care provided to children and other family members. Gross domestic product (GDP) per worker was used as a proxy of labour productivity. Deterministic one-way sensitivity analysis was performed. RESULTS: The indirect costs of short-term caregivers’ absenteeism in Poland was €306.2 million (0.116% of GDP) in 2006 and increased to €824.0 million in 2016 (0.180% of GDP). The number of care absence days grew from 5.9 million (0.45 days per worker) in 2006 to 10.6 million (0.70 days per worker) in 2016. Approximately 85% of the total costs were attributable to child care. The results of the sensitivity analysis show that the indirect costs varied from the base scenario by − 30.8 to + 15.8%. CONCLUSION: Informal short-term caregiving leads to substantial productivity losses in the Polish economy, and the dynamic upward trend of care absence incidence suggests that the costs of caregiving are expected to rise in the future. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-6952-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.