AIBU to think too many people being off work is causing the country to fall apart?

But if you, as a MH professional who presumably knows exactly how to access the help available, still suffer from poor MH, surely that indicates when people “believe they won’t work or won’t be enough”, they might have a point? I did all I could to access MH support when I needed it; all I got was a course of crap group CBT that gave me panic attacks when I tried to attend. When I didn’t show up for the next one because I could barely get out of bed, I simply got a terse letter saying I’d been discharged from the service. If I hadn’t had the support of family, I’d have been screwed.

And that’s only adult MH; don’t even get me started on CAMHS.

ETA: that’s not to be flippant about your (or anyone’s) MH struggles; simply to point out that often the quality of help available is poor.

I work in mental health and have poor mental health myself.

The majority of people who are on long-term sick with mental health issues have numerous services available to them but they refuse to access them as already believe they won't work or won't be enough.

Without trying.

I'm also owed about 8 days TOIL.

I have worked in a public sector team since March 2023. I started when we had 9 FTE.

We now have 6. In the same time the demand has increased 224%.

When one of us goes off sick we have no slack. We can't shuffle among ourselves. There might be a day a meeting i have planned has to be cancelled due to sickness, but not my sickness, sickness due to me needing to cover the more urgent meeting of the person sick.

We are drowning.

Yes, and what is contributing to this?

1. A dire lack of flexible working arrangements for disabled people (unless it’s mandated, employers basically have no incentive to do this);
2. A crumbling healthcare system, with many unable to work while they languish on NHS waiting lists;
3. A near-total lack of MH support which, coupled with a CoL crisis that’s pushed many to their limit, is an absolute disaster.
4. An education system which, increasingly, is failing significant numbers of children with SEND, in many cases meaning they end up leaving with no qualifications. Without sufficient apprenticeship schemes etc, what options do they have? They can’t all work in Amazon warehouses.

The vast majority of people want decent, fairly paid work that allows them to live an independent, fulfilling life. Blaming ordinary people simply distracts from the shameful systemic failures of successive governments. Makes politicians’ jobs much easier if we all blame the peasants though, doesn’t it?

1.9 jobseekers to every vacancy.
I am not sure how people out of the workforce are the problem.There is just not the jobs there.

It's hard to say... In the public sector there seems to be an expectation that workers will deliver more with less than ever. Problems with recruitment and retention (due to unattractive working conditions) mean that those remaining have to pick up the slack.
I teach in a special school. We're dangerously understaffed at times due to difficulties recruiting and, of course, staff illness. People work extremely hard, and kids are in rain or shine with all sorts of bugs and illnesses. A combination of overwork and exposure to all these germs creates a perfect storm. That's no doubt the same for a lot of workplaces - schools, nurseries, hospitals, GP surgeries, care homes, etc.
Another issue is our population aging and workforce shrinking - we definitely need immigration to fill these vital roles!

7% of the working age population is on long-term sick. It may not be the root of the problem but it's certainly contributing.

Exactly.

I find it absolutely unfathomable that public services including the NHS have been slashed to the bone, people have been through Covid and CoL crisis, pollution of our air and water is out of control, yet people like OP are still blaming the workforce! Of course there’s a small minority of people who take the piss at work, but anyone who honestly believes that’s the root of the problem must be living under a rock.

It's a rolling twelve month period, then it resets, in my job anyway. So you could be off for 2 months, and the following year off for five months, all fully paid. I haven't used it in my 15 years working there, only had a week here and there when needed, but it's good to know it exists.

A cold for one person can turn into respiratory problems & pneumonia for others . I hope you wore a proper mask when you were sick, going to work at nhs with poorly ppl as you say.

I agree with this

I think when the wider environment is as it is, any sick pay policy can contribute to further absence. Because the structural and societal factors all point us one way.

With paid leave, especially when generous, there's always going to be swinging the lead. With no paid leave, or barely any, you have people working when they're not fit to. Those working in person infect everyone else, but even when it's not, that can also be counterproductive. I work remotely and once, when soldiering on whilst not wanting to lose the day's wage, made a fuck up due to foggy headedness that caused more work for my colleagues than if I'd taken the day off.

And the other problem with no paid leave is people feeling it's fine to call in sick because they're not getting anything anyway, so there's no reason not to do it when you feel like it. Think of it as nice, flexible unpaid leave. This is less of a risk when people actually care and worry about keeping the job, but if it's something high turnover, temp or with staff who know their employer would struggle to recruit. I've never done this in my career job but I absolutely did it in part time roles around studies.

Perhaps the NHS's generous absence policy where people are off sick for months and managers don't address it as a "not fit for work" issue is also to blame?

I think businesses and services are just cost-cutting and no longer have the staff to manage absence properly.

My team at work suffers from this. There were 5 admins on the team and we coped great. One left and hasn’t been replaced. Four of us can do the work just fine on a normal day, we can just about cope with one person being off. But any more than that and we’re stuffed. We’re not really customer facing, but it impacts on those who are.

My department used to have 3 ft members of staff and 2 pt. Now there's 2ft we work opposite each other and both of us are expected to cover other departments (because they're short too) as the need arises, meaning if I cover department A for an hour, I then have an hour of my own work to catch up on.
So we're doing the workload of 4 full time posts each plus extra covering other departments, with 2 of us.
Service has declined because of that, and I'm working harder and harder but I've no hope of being able to meet all the customer demands because there's just too many. Customers get frustrated and of course take it out on the person in front of them - adding to the workload and taking up more of my time. Plus customers expectations have and are increasing.

So in return for doing 2.5 people's jobs I'm paid a wage that is a challenge to survive on, and I mean the basics, I am working longer hours with more to do, so I have less down time, or time to seek medical advice etc should I become ill because you know, being a human means that happens sometimes, and am in a mostly negative atmosphere of constant fire fighting and complaints.

I don't simply exist to make other people money or to serve them, I'm not a cog in a wheel, I'm a human being and unfortunately that means I have needs of my own that I just don't have time to meet, which has a knock on effect to my physical and mental health - that even if I have time to try and seek help for, is scarce anyway.

Businesses and services are treating their staff like a necessary evil who just eat profit they want and squeeze every last drop out of them to maximise that, and humans have a limit to what they can be resilient to. Shouting at them and telling them to be more resilient whilst piling on more work isn't having the desired effect is it? The whole workforce isn't suddenly lazy, I would say the majority are at capacity and they've nothing left to give.

You sbould stop going to work 'come rain or shine' - assuming that means you go in even when under the weather. I cannot stand people like you who do this, it just perpetuates the illnesses and for what? To rub the ego of those who think 'i never get sick' (untrue) and even worse secretly think 'i'm better than them'.

There's more important things in life than work ,capitalist robot.

It’s a cold - not covid with double pneumonia -and I worked in the nhs with poorly people - you don’t stay off with a cold -think how much school you’d miss if you stayed off for a cold.

There's not enough capacity within teams to allow for any absence. I completely understand companies not wanting teams 'overstaffed' and twiddling their thumbs but the reality is you just get a small dedicated team who when one leaves/is sick the others pick up as best they can when they don't really have enough capacity to even do their own job. The staff are stressed and despite their best efforts the service level drops. Stress lowers your immunity.

I've been trying to recruit two admins into my team, have been so stressed trying to cover all that work and after months of this guess what, I'm ill! I'm off sick so now my colleagues are having to cover my work. I don't get paid enough to run myself into the ground. I'm ill and I'm taking the time off.

@Toootss

ao you come into work sick, cause half a dozen others to get infected , sone of whom will be very ill and off for longer than you would have needed to clear your cold? dead clever that. So clever that our workplace encourages line managers to send staff home ( work from home or off sick ) rather than risk any bad outbreaks

you surely saw how covid - likemost viruses - killed some and left others with no symptoms at all?

I am on a few Universal Credit advice FB groups and every day there are about five posts where people are giving up work or have just handed their notices in due to MH, physical health or caring responsibilities.
It’s all linked. The kids who can’t attend school due to autism or ADHD, the mums who then can’t work, the aging parents, the lack of social care except in very significant cases. People can’t take it all on and work full time.
We have neglected all these systems and they’re all crumbling. The private sector cannot survive on its own. Jenny from accounts may have to quit if the NHS, social care, the education system and everything else lets her down.
I had an email about a colleague going off on long term sick yesterday and I almost cried. That’s another 30- 45 cases to be reallocated. We are already 2 and a half team members down. I’m in mental health and the workload is overwhelming. Everything has been cut and we can’t keep up. But we can’t turn away referrals.

I’ve been sick twice in the past two months with awful colds. What do you want me to do? Drag myself into work because you’ve decided I’m not sick enough? Fuck that.

Never been off with a cold, nor have adult DCs to my knowledge

I work in local government. There's one person in my team who goes off sick every year at the same time each year. Comes back when her sick pay drops. Does sweet FA when she's not off sick. Has been going on for over a decade now and yet sod all is done about it.

Another colleague has been off sick for the last six months with stress. Has come back on a phased return, and is now only doing about 10% of the job tasks.

Two people left recently and it took about six months to fill the posts.

So at one point, three of us were doing the work of 7 people. No temp staff brought in etc. Just expected to get on with it.

I've had two days off in the last year for flu, but if I was inclined, I could easily take six months off on full pay, citing stress. The public sector is a joke for this type of stuff and it's a big contributor to why services are so poor.

I think you are right. My mum died last month and I've been sorting the cremation and estate. Funeral Director off for two weeks (as it happened, didn't matter) and I was amazed there wasn't back up. Ditto solicitor, someone on holiday, no appointment for two weeks. Big company yet no spare solicitor available for the most mundane, 20 minute appointment. I was a bit boggled by it all, tbh.

Has it occurred to you, OP, that if workers were not stretched to their limit, with gigantic workloads, and there were more people on teams, they would be able to cover the tasks of those who are absent and things would flow better?

That's how things worked 40 years ago. If you have everyone working at the limit of their capacity, every disruption causes a problem. It's just like if you leave home right on time to get somewhere. Any disruption will make you late. You know that, and if you need to get to an important appointment on time you add 15 minutes to the commute for unforeseen circumstances. Teams now are planned for perfect circumstances (no sickness, no system disruption, etc), and if any tiny thing happens the whole castle of cards tumbles down.