To be absolutely fed up with NHS staff off sick

[njg616]

I manage a small team and have had several staff take the complete biscuit with sickness.

One took a year off before retirement - we couldn't recruit until she handed in her notice.

One got a similar job while off sick for 6 months, she then went off sick in her new job

Another got the job 'to cover her bills while she recovered from bunion surgery'

Currently I have someone off sick with a history of long and short term sickness. Has been off sick for half the time she's been in her post- 6 months. I follow policy, and refer her to HR who keep giving her more chances.

I find many staff use their NHS salaries while off sick as their sponsorship to do other things in their lives. This cannot be a good use of public funds especially with how things are at the minute.

These staff would not last a minute in the private sector. Sickness records don't seem to matter which to me is a huge indication of a person's commitment and reliability

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Yes an MP has outstanding sick pay & pensions.

I think 3months full pay should be a legal minimum, why should people be forced to rely on approx £90 pw after say 5 days? possibly caused by a co-worker coming in sick due to shite sick pay.

Valued workers put more into a business, as can been seen when the UK really did NHS to put their own lives on line to save others..... how quickly we all forget :(
Atm the emphasis seems to be on destroying public services.

The National sickness rates for the NHS is 5.6% which equates to 92.5 hours. Over 2.5 weeks each person each year

On top of generous leave. It's shocking even when you consider all the additional reasons that it might be higher than other sectors.

Why don't you join the NHS then? they ve huge numbers of vacancies and with such great leave and pay, you'd be far better off.

@Alexandra2001 well, quite. All those people complaining about how great and generous the NHS is compared to the private sector - vote with your feet, why don't you?

I worked for the NHS over 25 years and finally left in 2016.
Sickness was always a problem. There was a lot of genuine illness.
There were also a few members of staff who didn’t care and were happy to take whatever they could get away with. One person would turn up and then after an hour would need to leave for an emergency at home. This was a regular occurrence. He was eventually dismissed after being caught falsifying his annual leave.
A colleague of my dm was genuinely off sick and towards the end of her convalescence a friend asked her to work a shift in a nursing home. She was sacked because you’re either too sick to work or you’re not. Dm said the colleague genuinely hadn’t thought it through and didn’t mean to defraud the NHS. That was in the 80’s and things were more rigid.
I think the biggest problem in the NHS is bad management.

@Alexandra2001

OvxvO
"The National sickness rates for the NHS is 5.6% which equates to 92.5 hours. Over 2.5 weeks each person each year

On top of generous leave. It's shocking even when you consider all the additional reasons that it might be higher than other sectors."

_Why don't you join the NHS then? they ve huge numbers of vacancies and with such great leave and pay, you'd be far better off.

I don't work for the NHS but a lot of my family, including one of my kids. The leave is a definite plus. There are other pluses for working in the NHS . The Pension for many is very generous too.

Don't you think there is a problem with the high level of sickness leave then? It's at the highest rate ever since it first started to be recorded in 2010. That's crazy. Whatever the reasons then I can't see how you can describe it as anything other than shocking.

I'm sure you can do the maths but it's as though every member of staff at the NHS gets half a day a week off for sickness.

I'm all for everyone being treated fairly and the disparity between the generous sickness leave conditions provided by the NHS and those people get in other sectors is crazy. Why should the rights of public service workers (of which I was one when I worked) be so much better than other peoples.

I think some people on this thread are being a bit disingenuous when comparing NHS to private sector.

My husband works in the finance industry, if he’s ill with a minor illness or an infection he can choose to WFH, which makes his day shorter with no commute and stops him spreading germs in his office. As a nurse when I have a minor illness or infection I have to choose to go onto a ward/clinic and pass the germs onto others and work just as hard as usual with normal commute.

The consequences are very different and should be recognised.

Absolutely. There are lots of reasons you would expect the rate of sickness to be higher in the NHS than in the private sector - more women employed, more physical, low ability to work from home, stressful, plus things such as the age and socio economic of the employees. There are lots of factors.

The levels of sickness are still really high and has rapidly increased in recent years.

Not NHS but I work somewhere with decent sick policy and thank goodness. I’ve had to use it through no fault of my own after many years of hardly ever using it. I wouldn’t have coped without it.

@OvxvO the reasons why things are so much worse in the NHS since 2010 should really be blindingly obvious and I'm surprised that the date isn't ringing bells for you. Here's a little list for you:

• Austerity. This has multiple impacts: 1) more people in poverty, which leads to poorer health, 2), year on year real terms pay cuts, leading to people leaving, leading to staff shortages, leading to increased pressure on those staff who remain.
• Brexit. The NHS has lost staff to Brexit and is less able to recruit staff from countries with comparable health systems. Instead, international recruitment means recruiting from far flung places, staff recruited needing lots of supplemental training and support (supplied in the work environment), which means these staff aren't working at 100%.
• Simple demographics. It's been 13+ years. We have an older population with more comorbid health conditions, which means staff dealing with sicker patients.
• COVID - it's circulating. There's lots of it. If you catch it, you can't come in to work. This is on top of normal seasonal illness.

All of the things listed above also impact on each other. The level of vacancies in the NHS is mad and yet it is incredibly difficult to recruit because people don't want to work there.

Lastly I refer you to the points made above about the race to the bottom - why should the shitty treatment that is prevalent in the private sector be the norm? Why is that good enough?

No actually i do not think the sick levels are particularly high considering....

Staff deal with sick people, often with infectious illnesses, they should not be caring for them when they themselves could give then illnesses, they get assaulted & its a hi stress environment, morale is very low, they have large staff shortages, staff themselves are also older.

My Mum finished her nursing career in a care home, she would send home anyone who came in with a cold, a cold for an elderly person could lead to a chest infection and possible death, more so now with antibiotic resistance.

In the private sector it just doesn't matter if Sandra from accounts turns up feeling poorly or in many cases can request to work from home & still be productive, how does a Nurse or Physio work from home exactly? they might be able to write it off as admin for a day but tbh thats just massaging the figures.

From experience this is correct. Rather one consistent (long) period of absence than being repeatedly absent. Sadly some colleagues and employers struggle to believe that people get sick, even when hospital wards are full of sick people. Guess what? Those patients on the hospital wards form part of the workforce who are off sick!

Yup. Bradford Score

https://www.breathehr.com/en-gb/bradford-factor-calculator

I managed someone who was off sick on full pay until exactly the day the full pay ran out at 6 months. Then they suddenly felt well enough to return. Yes they had a GP certificate but also the GP was a family friend and they'd been seen out and about seemingly fine by other members of the team.
When they returned they needed a phased return and still didn't pick up the workload which meant that for about 8 months the team carried them. HR were useless and warned me that I couldn't demand too much and had to give them easy tasks. It was a joke. They actually told me I had ruined their time off because I'd insisted on weekly phone calls (which was policy).
Thankless task being honest and hardworking when you have people like this in your team.

I think it’s good - whatever staff can do to protect themselves from the carnage & brutality that is working for the NHS right now.

The level of sick leave in any institution is caused by the institution.

Shit conditions, loads off sick
Good conditions, low sick rate.

The public sector is a mess. Lots of people taking the piss miraculously return at 6months before their pay gets halved

I think I’m doing nhs working wrong… I’ve had 4 days off sick in 12 months and felt very guilty. One time I had an d&v and the other an inner ear infection that made me so dizzy I was on my hands and knees crawling to the toilet. If I have a third sickness before October I’ll have a formal letter and meeting with my manager.

i know some will work the system but the majority don’t and are really dedicated, going above and beyond in my 10 years of experience.

When you say “lots of people” doing this, how many do you actually know? I work in a large trust and know one person who did this. She was made redundant 3 months after coming back because essentially she provided evidence we didn’t need her as we coped fine for 6 months she was gone.

In the team I manage in the last 4 years I think we have had about 3 people off sick in total. 2 of those were for less than a week. The other was me, I had a week off when I changed some medication and wasn't safe to practice and a month off for a sudden bereavement.

That said, my team have the option to be reasonably flexible, do some wfh where needed, adjust hours slightly if required to sort out emergencies or childcare. So they can still work even if not 100% where if on a ward they probably would have needed a day off. My team are also happy and valued and while we all have our stressed days they are well supported. You can't underestimate how much difference it makes.

NHS staff are overwhelmingly female, many have caring responsibilities and come into contact with both the public and other staff. Even with good hand hygiene for staff, we can't ensure everyone in the environment follows this and bugs spread quickly. Hospitals are full of sick people. When you visit peoples homes you never know how clean they are and you are often in very close proximity. Staff may catch things from their children or take sick leave to care for children / parents / others even though they aren't supposed to. There are high rates of stress related illness because staffing is often low and acuity high, with little support. Lots of MSK issues. Many aspects of care are physical and even if you are careful you can still end up with pain and injuries. I fucked my back restraining people, although I did it as I was trained, and spending hours a week bending down repeatedly to get medication out of a cabinet, 25 patients, 3x a shift, often 6+ medications in a cabinet below waist height is a lot of repetitive action.

You will always get some people who take the piss and I'm sure the challenges in the NHS aren't unique but I do think there are bigger reasons behind higher sickness levels than the amount of paid leave available.

Can you please share your source data supporting this statement? Because otherwise I'm afraid I'm going to have to call bullshit.

@TeenLifeMum great, this has really reassured me that my job will still exist when I return after 6 months off ( hysterectomy and secondary breast cancer).

My school also appear to be coping fine without me too. Time to look for a new job, before I'm booted out I guess!

@Enigma52 this was a different situation. This was a huge time of change and this manager refused to change at all, was unnecessarily difficult and disruptive, and buried her head in the sand hoping it would all pass. She then, at a key point, went off sick with stress. In the circumstances we were all stressed but it meant the service was redesigned without her in put. She magically became well the day her full pay period ended.

I’m sure you are missed and colleagues are concerned about you. Wishing you a speedy recovery.

Ive seen this. I work in public sector. We had an administrator take 6 months off with job related stress -she came back the day that she was due to go on half pay. She did it again a couple of years later. Total piss take. She had probably the easiest (p/t) job in the dept. Absolutely zero stress - everyone tiptoed around her and treated her with kid gloves. She had the nerve to put in a grievance towards the end of the stress leave so as to eek it out a bit longer. She then resigned having wasted everyone's time.