Hidden Suffering — Unemployed Voice Concerns About Transmission of Their Health Data to the Job Centre

There are only few clinical studies that address the effects of unemployment on somatic health. Only under certain, particularly strict criteria, are unemployed adults to be included in studies as they are subjected to special attention by ethics committees given their status as "vulnerable subjects". Our original goal was to obtain data on the risk factor unemployment via a pseudonymized survey and a fitness test (spirometry or ergometry). A problem we faced was that majority of participants were very concerned about answering questions on their state of health. Even with a modified study design, an entirely anonymous survey, the concerns remained. Subsequent expert interviews showed that unemployed people, as patients, even have reservations when talking about their health to their doctors. They fear that the health data stored in the social insurance data set was accessible to the AMS. This behavior of avoidance could affect the health care of this demographic