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Article History

Received: 18 December 2019

Accepted: 2 August 2020

First Online: 8 August 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The study conformed to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki.Permission to access the data was sought from the participating hospital, which was also responsible for anonymizing the data before being passed on to the project group.The project was reported to the Norwegian Social Science Data Service (NSD), ensuring compliance with all ethical requirements for data collection, data storage, and data handling (ref: 40900 / 3 / LT). NSD is the Data Protection Official for Research for all Norwegian universities and university colleges, as well as for several hospitals and research institutes. According to national regulations, most research must only be submitted to NSD, which also evaluates the need for further ethical approval by the Data Inspectorate (). Further ethical approval was not required for this project. The present study uses pre-existing data from hospital registers on the variables organizational change and sickness absence. Therefore, we were not able to collect informed consent. However, the data on ID numbers were encrypted and the dates of an employment relationship were aggregated to quarters. For the survey data, all person-identification related information was removed by hospital administrators. In this manner, the hospital ensured that the register-based data, as well as the survey data were anonymized before being transferred to the researchers.

: Not applicable.

: All four authors declare that they have no competing interests.