Enhancing healthcare information security through VAE-driven anomaly detection in EHR access patterns.

Unemployed people form an important labour reserve, making it essential to monitor and support their work ability. In 2025, the unemployment rate was 5.9% in the EU and 10.2% in Finland []. Maintaining the health and work ability of unemployed people is also vital for social justice, reducing socioeconomic health inequalities, and lowering healthcare costs. Undetected illnesses can worsen over time. In Nordic welfare states, unemployment benefits are paid to those able to work and willing to accept job offers. If an unemployed person becomes ill, they are expected to apply for sickness allowance instead. However, unlike employees, unemployed people are not required to report sick leave, which may lead to eligible individuals not claiming sickness allowance. Across Europe, stricter access to disability pensions and stronger activation policies have created a group of unemployed people with health problems who fall between systems []. As welfare states move toward workfare-oriented activation [, ], more individuals with complex health and social issues enter employment services. With tighter conditionality, sickness benefits are becoming more important. Several studies have shown that unemployed people have poorer physical and mental health than employed people. Those who become unemployed tend to have worse health on average than employed people, but unemployment itself may also have adverse effects on health, especially on mental health [–]. Unemployment may negatively affect living conditions, income, social relationships, access to healthcare, and health behaviours []. The harmful health effects have been shown to increase with the duration of unemployment [, ]. There is little research on transitions into sickness allowance among the unemployed, as most studies focus on employees. A Finnish study [] found that although unemployed people had fewer sickness absence spells than employees, they had clearly more sickness absence days. Because employment status was defined based on the previous year, individuals were not necessarily unemployed when entering sickness allowance. Another study [] showed that among women, sickness absence risk due to mental disorders was similar for the unemployed and most other socioeconomic groups, while among men the risk was highest for the unemployed. Unemployment has also been linked to an increased risk of work disability and sickness absence among young people [, ]. A common feature of these studies is that unemployment was defined before follow-up, rather than examining transitions into sickness benefits during ongoing unemployment. A German survey study [] further found that among the unemployed, men, older individuals, and those with lower education were more likely to receive sickness absence even after adjusting for health factors.