Time of Return to Work (RTW) May Not Correlate with Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurements (PROM) at Minimum One Year Post Arthroscopic Bankart Repair

Abstract

It is widely recognized that work serves a dual role by not only ensuring financial independence but also functioning as a vital source of psychosocial well-being and contributing significantly to the attribution of meaning in life. The cost of work disability can be a multifactorial problem for both employers and workers; thus the inability to return to work (RTW) may have a destructive effect on mental health and confidence. Shoulder surgery is one of the conditions that inevitably impacts patients’ ability to work. As current data focus on restoring range of motion, strength, and the patients’ activity, to this day the data about RTW post shoulder surgery remain limited. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the return-to-work time of patients treated with an arthroscopic Bankart repair and to evaluate if patient-reported outcomes (PROM) correlate with the incapacity to work after an arthroscopic Bankart repair. We performed a retrospective review by conducting a questionnaire with patients more than 12 months after surgery and we identified 31 patients who met the criteria for the study and were able to contact 17 of them. In this paper we demonstrated that on average among groups working physically and at the office we may expect patients who underwent arthroscopic Bankart repair to return to work within 7 weeks from the surgery, with office workers tending to return significantly faster with an average of 2.5 weeks (p = 0.0239).