I genuinely don’t understand how so many people here hardly ever take sick leave though I agree with a pp that it probably does make a big difference what your job is and whether you can do it from home and whether you get paid sick leave etc (not to say that most people are malingerers, rather that self employed people often put earning ahead of their health and work through when they really shouldn’t!). I think if I had an office job I’d have a much better sick leave record. You will also probably get a bit of a skewed perspective on here asking this as those who are never ill are going to be happier to chime in.
I’m a doctor and when I was younger I hardly ever took sick leave as medicine has such a macho culture and it’s kind of an unwritten rule/expectation that the only time you should take sick leave is if you’re ill enough to be admitted to hospital or dead basically. Broken leg etc. nope you’re expected in as usual! As I’ve got older, had a child, acquired various chronic illnesses, and the macho culture has actually changed a bit (glacially slowly but in the right direction of us not all having to be “heroes and martyrs” - that spread illness - as a pp put it both for our own sake and for patients sake when it comes to infectious illnesses), I would call in sick probably 3-4 days a year in total most years I reckon.
I wouldn’t dream of calling in sick for a cold (I’d never be at work in wintertime otherwise!) but I definitely would for a vomiting bug or “proper” flu with a 40 degree temperature and hallucinations etc. I do think maybe we are more likely to get ill than most people due to our occupation (and our regulator is terrifying so you do feel you need to be firing on all 4 cylinders when at work as you can’t really say “oh well I didn’t deal with that patient well because I wasn’t feeling 100 percent” as their response would be that you should have called in sick if not well enough to work) so maybe it’s me that has the skewed perspective 🤣 I was kind of shocked during the pandemic that I was able to have a Christmas without flu OR norovirus, it was a revelation to me. I usually spend at least some of the Christmas break in a feverish haze…
Last year I had to have a big operation so it was more than usual due to that issue obviously. But I get bloody norovirus pretty much every single winter (because people kindly come to see me with it and it is so super infectious). This winter I’ve managed to get it twice, it’s so miserable. A vaccine for it cannot come soon enough. It has been a horrendous winter for infectious illness generally this year. I get flu pretty often in winter as well (despite flu jabs) and I have asthma so that often becomes a proper chest infection afterwards as well. I’d say flu and norovirus are the main reasons I end up taking time off work, oh and COVID has also joined that list, it’s not quite as bad as flu for me but not far off and I currently seem to get that about once a year. It’s definitely added to my total average annual sick leave and meant more episodes of all of our staff going down with illness, especially as it seems to have waves in the summer as well as winter annoyingly.
I have occasionally needed an operation or a few weeks off for depression (I have bipolar disorder and try really hard not to take time off work because of it, because mental health issues are still heavily stigmatised in medicine though the needle is slowly moving in the right direction on that too, but also I do have to protect myself and patients if I am really unwell with it). I would say for that I take 2-3 weeks off work with depression when things are really bad, maybe every 5 years or so.