Sickness absence has gone up by an average of three days per year to around 10 days per year for staff at West Berkshire Council.<\/p>\n
Long-term sickness is reducing, but short-term days off have gone up.<\/p>\n
Short term sick leave has gone up at West Berkshire Council, latest figures show<\/p>\n
But the council\u2019s HR team says that 2020\/21 was the primary year impacted by the Covid pandemic, and this impacted on absence rates in that normal absence was reduced significantly due to a large proportion of staff working at home for the majority of the year; thus 2020\/21 was an anomaly.<\/p>\n
The last two years have seen the average number of days off at around nine.<\/p>\n
The HR report to the council shows that long-term absence is defined as a continuing sickness absence of more than 28 consecutive calendar days.<\/p>\n
During 2024\/25, long-term sickness absence was 52 per cent of all sickness absences (8,204.5 days lost); in 2023\/24 it was 64.2 per cent (10,514.5 days lost).<\/p>\n
This shows a significant decrease in long-term absence.<\/p>\n
During 2024\/25, short-term absence has significantly increased to 48 per cent of all sickness absence (7,561.5 days lost); in 2023\/24 it was 35.8 per cent (5,855 days lost).<\/p>\n
The most common reason for short-term absence is for minor illnesses \u2013 such as coughs\/colds and flu; sickness\/nausea and diarrhoea.<\/p>\n
The top three overall reasons for sickness absence at West Berkshire Council in 2024\/25 were mental health conditions \u2013 33.4 per cent; minor illnesses \u2013 15 per cent; and musculoskeletal problems \u2013 14.4 per cent.<\/p>\n
The most common reason for long-term absence is mental health conditions. This includes stress, depression and anxiety.<\/p>\n
In total, 33.4 per cent of all sickness absence (long-term and short-term) was due to it.<\/p>\n
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes an annual survey on workplace absence for all sectors.<\/p>\n
Across the UK, the number of working days lost because of sickness or injury was an estimated 148.9 million in 2024.<\/p>\n
This is an increase of 9.9 million from the pre-coronavirus 2019 levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sickness absence has gone up by an average of three days per year to around 10 days per…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,12991,229,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-21629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-newbury","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}