Health care personnel

Health care education

Health care education is a selection of education codes from Statistics Norway's Standard for Classification of Educations. In addition, the Register of Education for Health Care Personnel requiring authorization, administered by the Directorate of Health is used to define health care educations. The statistics provide information on 33 separate educations, 3 specializations and for the 3 aggregated groups for small health education types. For educations that are not in health care, there are 4 aggregated groups.

People who have been granted a license as health care personnel at a secondary educational level will be registered with a different education in the statistics if they have further education at university level. But for health care personnel already educated at a university, for example a nurse, this will not occur, because we have chosen to define the person as a nurse even though they have followed another basic course at university level.

Employed persons

Employed persons are defined as those who conducted at least one hour of paid work or worked as self employed in the 4th quarter each year and individuals who had such work, but who were temporarily absent due to illness, vacation, maternity leave etc. For employees and self-employed the register base is arranged so that the total number is decided by the number of self-employed according to Statistics Norway's Labour Force Sample Surveys. Who is considered self-employed is partly determined by whether they have employees with an active employment per 4th quarter and partly by income data from the year prior to the year of reference.

In certain contexts it is necessary to choose a main job for employees and multiple job holders. This is necessary in order to be able to distribute employed persons according to industry and place of work (municipality). As a main rule, the job with the largest number of working hours is defined as the main job.

Characteristics of individuals

Information about age is collected at the end of the year for the period 2000-2005. In 2006 the minimum age to be counted as employed was lowered from 16 to 15 years, in accordance with international recommendations. Also, the definition of age was changed from age at the end of the year to age at the end of the reference week. From 2015 onwards age is collected at the 16^th of November.

Characteristics related to employment

Sickness absence certified by a doctor. Information about sickness absence certified by a doctor is collected from the National Insurance Administration's Register of sickness absence. The percentages of sickness absence for the fourth quarter of every year are used in the adjustment of the contracted man-years. The register of sickness absence only includes employees, but it is assumed that self-employed have the same absence percentage as employees within the same educational group.

Persons outside the labour force is made up of people who are not employed nor registered as unemployed. They are classified according to other registers in the following order: government employment programs, work rehabilitation, disability pensioners, retirement pensioners, receivers of cash-for-care, further education and the others.

From 2015 onwards

Contractual percentage of full-time equivalent

Contractual percentage of full-time equivalent is what you have agreed to work according to your contract of employment. The employer shall not consider additional work, overtime or different types of absence from work or if the hours have been paid or not. The information on contractual percentage of full-time equivalent is based on what is reported to the a-ordningen.

For persons that are paid by the hour without contractual working hours per week, e.g. on-call temporary workers, the employer can report 0 as contractual percentage of full-time equivalent. Statistics Norway will then calculate contractual percentage of full-time equivalent from what is reported as paid hours and number of hours that corresponds to a 100 per cent position in the moth of reporting.

In the reporting of the contractual full-time equivalent (FTE) percentage deficiencies have occurred. This is especially true for workers paid by the hour. To adjust for the deficiencies in this reporting, Statistics Norway has developed a new method for predicting the FTE-percentage. The new method is described in detail in this article, Metode for bedring av informasjon om arbeidstid i a-ordningen, but it is only available in Norwegian. In short we use a machine-learning algorithm named XGBoost, to predict the contractual FTE percentage in cases where the reported values are either missing or considered erroneous, using the information we have on earnings.

Contractual working hours per week

By combining information regarding contractual percentage of full-time equivalent and number of hours per week in a full position, contractual working hours per week is calculated for each employment (job) and wage earner (person).

The number of hours in a full position is the number of working hours that makes a full position in a similar employment. Unpaid lunchbreaks are withdrawn, but it is not adjusted for potential additional work, overtime or different types of absence from work

Contractual full-time/part-time

Full time is when the contractual percentage of full-time equivalent equals 100 or more. Part-time is when the contractual percentage of full-time equivalent is less than 100.

From 2000-2014

Contracted man-hours is estimated by measuring contracted working hour per week and comparing it to full time. Full-time is defined as 37.5 hours per week, but with reservation for certain professions, for example professions with shift work, where contracted full time work is estimated to less than 37.5 hours per week.

Contracted working hours is the number of working hours per week that the employee is obliged to work according to his work contract. Any absence from work caused by illness, holiday etc. should not be deducted from the contracted working, and overtime is not taken into account. Information about working hours in the National Insurance Administration's Register of Employees from the year 2001 registered in exact hours, while earlier the working was registered in intervals (4-19 hours, 20-29 hours or 30 hours plus per week).

The self-employed do not have contracted working hours. Instead an estimated number for mean working hours is taken from Statistic Norway's Labour Force Sample Survey. The estimate is conducted for different groups divided by sex and three different educational levels.

Characteristics related to enterprises

The variables workplace and industry are taken from the Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises, and refers to the enterprise where the employee is working. For self-employed who are not tied to any establishment or enterprise, information about place of residence, education and self-employment activities of other family members are taken into account.

Industry

is based on The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC 2007) (NOS D 383).