Would you be off sick if you weren't being paid?

[MakeMineALarge1]

I work for the NHS, the sick package is very good, full pay for 6 months then half pay for another 6.

I know that its very stressful at the moment in acute care, sickness in our department is currently at 30% with up to 6 members of staff off per shift.

Lots of people citing stress etc, needing time out, and this is granted on full pay.

If you were self employed or hourly paid, would as people still be off with stress and still need "time out"

It seems a lot of threads on here start with "my anxiety" or I have PTSD or I am depressed. Is it too easy nowadays to ring your GP and be signed off on this basis?

I’ve been off sick from my nhs nurse job since last year, so well into 6mo half pay. (Not all of it was sick since then) but wasn’t then, and still not physically fit for work. Currently waiting on 2 consultant appointments that are taking a long time. In a lot of pain. And worried my pay is going to stop soon and I’m going to lose my job. No def wouldn’t be doing this for fun. I’m hoping one of my issues won’t end my career but I don’t know and I also don’t know how i’ll pay the bills in a few months. I wouldn’t have been able to work even if I didn’t have 6mo full pay/half pay. It did help at the time but I’d no idea I’d be off this long and things would get so much worse. It’s not a nice position to be in.

I work for a LA. Very good sickness benefits. We had a high level of sickness (15 years ago) in my team. We work shifts in a highly stressful and emotional professional role. We introduced short notice AL for days when you just can't face coming to work but you aren't sick - if we can cover it, you can have the day off.

Worked a treat. Hardly have any sickness now.

@ElephantOfRisk

I am self employed if I am feeling unwell I can structure my work, do half a day and try to work around the illness to get the work done. An employer often won't do that and there is no incentive for an employee to volunteer to work in that way.

For some employed people that is possible to an extent as well. If I had an upset stomach or just a bit below par or coughing and sneezing, i would ask to work from home where i'm not spreading germs and have easy access to the toilet if required. Something like a migraine I couldn't work with but to be honest other than two broken arms or mental health, i would work as much as possible.

I am relating this to my own experience of employers. I used to work for a local authority that had the same sickness benefits as the op. The option to work from home was not on the table and if you were daft enough to go in, you would either be expected to carry on as normal, after all if you were well enough to attend ? Or you would be sent home if you looked sick enough. Its the attitude to sickness that needs to change, its very much geared to clamping down on malingerers, not seeing how we can help people get back to work. ( despite what the policies and HR say)

Worked for an employer who had a good sick pay scheme, for which I was very grateful indeed, when I became ill. I was not physically or mentally able to continue to go to work, at that time.

There may have been employees who abused the scheme, I don't know. Anyone I knew who availed of it, including me, was completely genuine.

I have had to take unpaid sick leave before because I was so ill I physically couldn’t get out of bed, if I was taking sick leave for stress or similar I’d be using the time to find a less stressful job.

In the same way that everyone knows a single mum who is living in luxury on benefits, or is mates with someone who drives a BMW cos they are working cash in hand whilst on JSA, everyone knows someone who uses paid sick leave to supplement their annual leave allowance. Even when you really do know people who manage to screw over the system that does not mean that everyone with access to decent TACOS is cheating.
Do we really want nurses and doctors sniffing and coughing over patients, rushing to the loo with D&V etc. Issuing medication when they are not mentally well? The conversation should be about improved TACOS for those who don’t get paid, not a race to the bottom

Yep, I agree @Sunshineonmars.

Obviously flexible arrangements are not open to everyone and some employers don't want to risk an employment tribunal if they've allowed someone to work who wasn't fit.

DH once had an op on his tow which meant he wasn't allowed to wear steel toe cap boots for a while and he wasn't allowed to do his job unless wearing them. he was otherwise fine and asked if there were any light duties he could do and was told no. So he was off whilst able to work, albeit not in his normal job.

toe

Good luck Elephant. You’ll get there. Take it slowly and don’t expect things to go perfectly.

And once I was a long term temp (no paid sick at all) at an organisation where two members of permanent employees with very generous paid leave both came in while they were clearly unwell with norovirus and refused to go home, they then passed it on to me so I lost three days pay because they were too selfish to want to blemish their sickness record.

This is an odd thread to start @MakeMineALarge1

The implication is that people who get sick pay 'swing the lead' and take time off when they are not really sick. (I do know of people who 'save' their sick leave as 'holiday days' and add them to their annual allowance.)

But the answer is simple: people who are s/e tend not to take as much time off as they often can't afford to.

I would as the only things I have been off for on the last few years have been related to my asthma (mine is severe and I end up in a and e annually and take oral steroids about 6 times a year).

I was also off with sciatica and couldn't move.

If I didn't get sick pay I would still be off but I'm a very precarious situation

@blubberyboo

Sick pay is frequently “ sold” as part of a remuneration package and often it means employers are offering lower salaries or freezes so that they can include this benefit.

In the case of employees without this benefit or self employed there are insurance products that can be purchased such as income protection policies or key person benefits.

So I guess what I’m saying if you are choosing a job based on salary or potential earnings you also need to consider the entire package. Nobody wants to pay for insurance but if you don’t have then you should pay for it, not judge other people just because they have the benefit or have bought cover.

Except there are people (myself included) working alongside colleagues who have sick pay because it was offered by your employer previously but it has now been rolled back. It’s hard not to resent people who openly talk about “going off on sick” as a means to stick it to the boss or because they don’t like a new policy being implemented like a clear desk policy. Sick pay should definitely be available for all but where abused there should be consequences.

Oh I land I had PND and PNA but it was while I was on maternity leave

I used to work in a civil service role where the sickness benefits were very good. There was an investigation as our department had the highest levels of sickness in the service.
Since then I've worked in places with little to no sickness benefit. In fact, in places where you could be sacked for taking too much time off.
I'm not one to "throw a sicky" myself, but I have certainly forced myself in on days when I wouldn't have if there had been better benefits.

I suspect a lot of people would just leave (well in higher numbers than they already are).

Your post is a misrepresentation - you do not get the full sick pay benefits until you have worked in the NHS for 5 years.

Your post also reeks of support for the race to the bottom. Everyone should get decent sick pay.

@MakeMineALarge1

I work for the NHS, the sick package is very good, full pay for 6 months then half pay for another 6.

I know that its very stressful at the moment in acute care, sickness in our department is currently at 30% with up to 6 members of staff off per shift.

Lots of people citing stress etc, needing time out, and this is granted on full pay.

If you were self employed or hourly paid, would as people still be off with stress and still need "time out"

It seems a lot of threads on here start with "my anxiety" or I have PTSD or I am depressed. Is it too easy nowadays to ring your GP and be signed off on this basis?

What this means to me is that people who don’t have decent sickness policies will be forced to go to work when they aren’t well, because they can’t afford not to - and that should not be the case, in a civilised society.

I’m SE I work when if I got sick pay I wouldn’t. I will drag myself in unless I’m actually vomiting or similar. I cannot afford not to and it sucks.

My husband doesn't get any pay for the first 7 days of sickness. I'm public sector so I get full pay.

He has a condition which means he if off sick around 4 days per month. This is money we have to learn to cope without but his job understand and he still has a job.
If he was in the public sector too many absences would lead to him being under warning and losing his job so it would be more beneficial for him to take six months off work paid and try to recover rather than undergoing temporary fixes and relapses every few weeks.

I don't think the sick pay in the NHS (and other public services/companies with similar practices) is too generous, although I DO think that some people abuse it.

I think the trouble is that the policies have been put in place to make up for the fact that organisations such as the NHS know they're putting some of their staff under too much pressure. Offering sick leave and access to counselling is an easy way to avoid being challenged about the fact that working practices are inefficient, sometimes dangerous, and very stressful. It puts the onus on the individual to find ways of coping rather than accepting that maybe the problem is the working practices. For someone with genuine mental health issues this can actually make things worse!

Also managers aren't trained properly in how to use the policy properly (and often don't have time to make it work properly). It's not mandatory to hold a meeting after 3 periods of absence if you know they're all genuine and there are no long term concerns, but you do have to document and justify not doing so. Likewise, a meeting doesn't have to be a punitive act, it can be a supportive one. OTOH someone who plays the system will very often underperform in other ways and therefore there are often other avenues available to tackle them whuch management often avoids for an easier life. Management is a skill that has to be learned and requires hard work. It doesn't come automatically with being promoted into a management post the way some organisations seem to think.

I’m self employed. Until covid, I hardly had any days off sick. I can count on my fingers how many in the 10 years Pre covid and some of them are not my illnesses but my dc. The past year has seen me take 8 (from the top of my head) days off at short notice, because I or one of the dc has had to be tested.
It’s A really worrying Time, but a risk I took when going self employed (obviously never realising that covid would strike and what that could mean). I know several friends who work for the council/nhs/private firms with excellent sick pay policies and they have no idea what it is like to have to drag yourself to work when you feel ill.

One of my best friends is self-employed, so no sick pay. She was struggling with mental health issues but couldn’t afford to stop working so just tried to push through - she’s now been forced to stop because she’s pretty much had a nervous breakdown; I dare say she’ll be off a lot longer than if she’d been able to take some time to get things under control earlier, and her current financial position isn’t making life any easier.

Don't fall into the trap of believing that the NHS is wasting money left right and centre. That's a carefully orchestrated campaign to make us despise the underinvested NHS, ready for a jolly private sector takeover, already partly underway by multiple US healthcare conglomerates.
I'm self employed, nursing a cold while I wait for my PCR as my kid has Covid. I used to drag myself into work with throat viruses etc when I worked for the NHS. Next thing, it rips through the department. Presenteeism is as damaging as absenteeism, and much less rare. Now I fund my own sickness, I've taken insurance but have never claimed because I can usually rejig my work for post recovery time, and my working day is manageable as well. I get to eat and visit the loo these days. Since Covid, it's a real dilemma as to whether you take your viruses into work- my clients are vulnerable. I really thought my kid had a cold starting, but just to be sure..........and the PCR was positive. I've entertained myself today, feebly scrolling round the Internet, and watched a young American women have an incredibly painful septic arm squeezed by a well meaning friend/relative to get the pus out - cupfuls and cupfuls at high pressure. She should have had surgical drainage, IV antibiotics, the lot. That's the reality of private healthcare USA style. The haves, and the have nots. Beware! We do not want the fear of ill health or old age coming to Britain.
And while we're at it, OP, people with CPTSD or MH problems will be overrepresented on a Wednesday morning on Mumsnet because many have been forced to quit work or are too unwell to work at all.
to you all

I'm self-employed so don't get paid if I don't work. However, because I'm self-employed I can be very flexible. I am in charge of where and when I work, I can turn work down and if I need to I can outsource it to someone else. That's what I did when one of my children was born - when I only took about six weeks off because I didn't want to lose regular work I'd built up over time. And when that child was later ill I could still carry on doing enough work to tick over –sometimes during an inpatient stay in hospital.

That said, I don't tend to be ill. I don't often catch things, perhaps because I have worked from home for about 15 years (though I do have kids in school), and in any case I wouldn't have to stop working if I was infectious – and I'm not anywhere near as stressed as I imagine I would be if I'd been working in the NHS in the last year or so.