NHS Staff Sickness

[E63eeeeee...]

vaud said:

I guess the alternative to pay rise is something more creative with taxation for those professions. Maybe more junior staff pay lower than standard income tax until they hit a certain threshold?

Given it's public money at both ends, and the net effect is the same, why would it be any better to make the tax system even more complicated rather than just up salaries?

[Ityre]

I work in the transport sector, thats publicly funded, went on a course some years ago regards absence etc, the person running the course said our companies sickness record was awful and it cost the business x amount a year and the sickness rate was circa 15% , I asked what the local councils was or the NHS she stated she didn’t know, I did say maybe ours was too low 😜, she was not happy. Anyway there are quite a few that take the piss and suddenly recover only when they drop to half pay, boils my piss considering I’ve only ever had 5 day sick leave in my entire career (and that was Covid and only once it started counting toward sickness of course 🤬), anyway any public body that is heavily unionised will have this, these jobs seem to attract a certain type, and its always the same ones!

[Logistix]

Except that as has been repeatedly pointed out, NHS senior staff have a 1.6% sickness absence rate, well below the private sector.

Any thoughts?

[Dingu]

Ityre said:

I work in the transport sector, thats publicly funded, went on a course some years ago regards absence etc, the person running the course said our companies sickness record was awful and it cost the business x amount a year and the sickness rate was circa 15% , I asked what the local councils was or the NHS she stated she didn’t know, I did say maybe ours was too low ??, she was not happy. Anyway there are quite a few that take the piss and suddenly recover only when they drop to half pay, boils my piss considering I’ve only ever had 5 day sick leave in my entire career (and that was Covid and only once it started counting toward sickness of course ??), anyway any public body that is heavily unionised will have this, these jobs seem to attract a certain type, and its always the same ones!

It could be that transport is a jolly compared to healthcare. Quite probably in fact.

[E63eeeeee...]

Logistix said:

Except that as has been repeatedly pointed out, NHS senior staff have a 1.6% sickness absence rate, well below the private sector.

Any thoughts?

Richer people are healthier, and some survivor bias (healthier people more likely to become senior). You'll see exactly the same pattern across other industries where senior people will have significantly less sickness absence than junior staff.

[Logistix]

E63eeeeee... said:

Logistix said:

Except that as has been repeatedly pointed out, NHS senior staff have a 1.6% sickness absence rate, well below the private sector.

Any thoughts?

Richer people are healthier, and some survivor bias (healthier people more likely to become senior). You'll see exactly the same pattern across other industries where senior people will have significantly less sickness absence than junior staff.

Quite possibly, although I’m not sure you can describe senior medical positions as being stress free.
The point I was making was that when people trot out the usual story that public sector workers, and in particular doctors are all workshy and on the make taking endless sick days as an answer to why they don’t deserve decent pay rises, the facts don’t actually support this view.

[E63eeeeee...]

Logistix said:

E63eeeeee... said:

Logistix said:

Except that as has been repeatedly pointed out, NHS senior staff have a 1.6% sickness absence rate, well below the private sector.

Any thoughts?

Richer people are healthier, and some survivor bias (healthier people more likely to become senior). You'll see exactly the same pattern across other industries where senior people will have significantly less sickness absence than junior staff.

Quite possibly, although I’m not sure you can describe senior medical positions as being stress free.
The point I was making was that when people trot out the usual story that public sector workers, and in particular doctors are all workshy and on the make taking endless sick days as an answer to why they don’t deserve decent pay rises, the facts don’t actually support this view.

Completely agree with you on the broader point and you'd have to have had very little interaction with the NHS to think that the people there are remotely workshy.

[Ityre]

Dingu said:

Ityre said:

I work in the transport sector, thats publicly funded, went on a course some years ago regards absence etc, the person running the course said our companies sickness record was awful and it cost the business x amount a year and the sickness rate was circa 15% , I asked what the local councils was or the NHS she stated she didn’t know, I did say maybe ours was too low ??, she was not happy. Anyway there are quite a few that take the piss and suddenly recover only when they drop to half pay, boils my piss considering I’ve only ever had 5 day sick leave in my entire career (and that was Covid and only once it started counting toward sickness of course ??), anyway any public body that is heavily unionised will have this, these jobs seem to attract a certain type, and its always the same ones!

It could be that transport is a jolly compared to healthcare. Quite probably in fact.

Ive never considered my occupation a ‘Jolly’ it certainly has its challenges and I’m purposefully being vague as to who i work for, I imagine working for the NHS has its challenges unique to its environment working around sick people and seeing many not recover in particular young patients. I never intended for this to being a peeing contest, it’s about certain people taking the piss out of employers sick leave, usually the same types, not the genuinely ill ones.

[asfault]

Logistix said:

Except that as has been repeatedly pointed out, NHS senior staff have a 1.6% sickness absence rate, well below the private sector.

Any thoughts?

Management in our retail store all had a much better sickness record than the store assistants. And thr managers got sick pay from day 1. The reason. Welll if you are off sick your work generally piles up and no one is going to do it.

[valiant]

Ityre said:

Dingu said:

Ityre said:

I work in the transport sector, thats publicly funded, went on a course some years ago regards absence etc, the person running the course said our companies sickness record was awful and it cost the business x amount a year and the sickness rate was circa 15% , I asked what the local councils was or the NHS she stated she didn’t know, I did say maybe ours was too low ??, she was not happy. Anyway there are quite a few that take the piss and suddenly recover only when they drop to half pay, boils my piss considering I’ve only ever had 5 day sick leave in my entire career (and that was Covid and only once it started counting toward sickness of course ??), anyway any public body that is heavily unionised will have this, these jobs seem to attract a certain type, and its always the same ones!

It could be that transport is a jolly compared to healthcare. Quite probably in fact.

Ive never considered my occupation a ‘Jolly’ it certainly has its challenges and I’m purposefully being vague as to who i work for, I imagine working for the NHS has its challenges unique to its environment working around sick people and seeing many not recover in particular young patients. I never intended for this to being a peeing contest, it’s about certain people taking the piss out of employers sick leave, usually the same types, not the genuinely ill ones.

Although there probably are comparables with management in both sectors.

I too work in public transport and management is merely a tick box exercise where the flow chart is king. If you fit neatly into a box then you are managed effectively, if not then it becomes problematic for local managers and the can is kicked down the road or ignored or left for someone else to sort.

The pisstakers (that exist in every profession both public and private) simply know how to play the process to their advantage and ‘game the system’. Local managers are simply not empowered to make difficult decisions or indeed want to be responsible for them in case of blowback and so Sandra is off for 6 months whilst her Facebook is full of holiday snaps.

It’s not solely a problem for the NHS or where I work, it’s a similar problem where you have a massive workforce and have to try and implement a ‘one size fits all’ policy on absences forgetting that we’re all individuals and each case can be different.

As for the NHS itself? Obviously the work place is a bit more conducive to becoming ill, morale is on the floor and you have your ultimate bosses acting in a clueless and combative manner so disenfranchisement is rife. If an employee feels valued then they are less likely to pull a sickie and that means paying them what they are worth, helping to retain them and giving them the tools to do their job effectively (more staff).

[161BMW]

E63eeeeee... said:

161BMW said:

This

Giving pay rises won’t help because everyone be asking for it then country will be broke. House prices would go up even more not down.

Everyone is underpaid. Medical profession isn’t only one. Clearly the oath doesn’t mean much anymore by putting lives at risk by striking.

Also yeah graduates of other professions should be made to pay back.

It just pure greed and selfishness. If you were running a country and gave 33% pay rise knowing country be broke and other public sectors would strike.

Anyone can see it could go down this route then the country be more messed up than it is.

Why don’t they help managers / make better decisions instead of wasting energy on pay rises ? The better decisions can give cost savings. Then maybe later in time pay rises can be given if enough cost savings made ? Examples of some of the management decisions that could be made better are earlier in the thread.

No. You seem to have decided that current rates of pay are correct, despite all the evidence indicating that low pay is part of the problem. Broadly, there's an optimal pay structure across medical roles that is enough to attract the calibre of people we need, stop them leaving to other jobs or employers, and both motivate them to do a good job and prevent them from being distracted by the pressures of low pay. Just listening to medical professionals should be enough to tell you we're not there. Or noticing that people are on strike. Or looking at the number of vacancies. Or looking at how many people are leaving. Or looking at how many people are joining training programmes.

Your idea that this is pure greed and selfishness says far more about you than it does about the people who do these critical and difficult jobs and just don't want to get worse off every year. You rarely solve problems in a complex system by top down intervention. One thing that does reliably work is to increase the number of good, motivated people. Continually cutting away at their standard of living is the exact opposite of this.

There needs to be a workable solution to all this that is workable long-term. The covid handouts / Ukraine etc we now have cost of living crisis. If give pay rises these are locked in and how going to give more money when no more money to give unless cutbacks in other areas like education / defence etc. Defence is chronically underspent.

NHS needs cleaning out and restructuring. Getting rid of a lot of the middle managers who waste money making bad decisions. The guidelines needs rewriting so empower / enable people to use common sense which seems to be lacking in the nhs. Management decisions need to properly consult people at all levels from top to bottom whether that doctors, nurses, etc so everyone can make a valuable input. As sometimes the blanket guidelines may not be suitable in some cases and the impact can be discussed. Perhaps some senior doctors or nurses who know what happening on the shop floor at grassroots should be in management or at least consulted on management decisions so money isn’t wasted and money is well spent and the nhs is running efficiently. These cost savings can then be filtered into improving nhs, pay rises. This is a bit of a long game this route but better than shouting and protesting “we going on strike, we want more money, my plumber earns more than me, you know how many years of medical training I had”. If they put more effort into lobbying and helping get reform in a workable long term solution instead of short term we want more money when there is no money then people would have more respect for the doctors and nurses. Because much like the TFL, people are losing empathy with those striking when waiting lists are so long, can’t even get a doctors appointment and they don’t even want you to visit their surgery. The energy spent on striking is better used on campaigning or getting reform from top to bottom then the pay rises can come and the nhs can remain “free”. Because with the current situation it may well end up privatised. As well they need to reread the Hippocratic oath and remind themselves why they became a doctor / nurse etc. If is because of money then they knew what they letting themselves in for and could have done a different profession. Then let’s not forgot the generous public sector pensions why are better than the private sector. I’ve said all I’ve wanted to say on this topic so won’t be commenting anymore on this.

[E63eeeeee...]

161BMW said:

There needs to be a workable solution to all this that is workable long-term. The covid handouts / Ukraine etc we now have cost of living crisis. If give pay rises these are locked in and how going to give more money when no more money to give unless cutbacks in other areas like education / defence etc. Defence is chronically underspent.

NHS needs cleaning out and restructuring. Getting rid of a lot of the middle managers who waste money making bad decisions. The guidelines needs rewriting so empower / enable people to use common sense which seems to be lacking in the nhs. Management decisions need to properly consult people at all levels from top to bottom whether that doctors, nurses, etc so everyone can make a valuable input. As sometimes the blanket guidelines may not be suitable in some cases and the impact can be discussed. Perhaps some senior doctors or nurses who know what happening on the shop floor at grassroots should be in management or at least consulted on management decisions so money isn’t wasted and money is well spent and the nhs is running efficiently. These cost savings can then be filtered into improving nhs, pay rises. This is a bit of a long game this route but better than shouting and protesting “we going on strike, we want more money, my plumber earns more than me, you know how many years of medical training I had”. If they put more effort into lobbying and helping get reform in a workable long term solution instead of short term we want more money when there is no money then people would have more respect for the doctors and nurses. Because much like the TFL, people are losing empathy with those striking when waiting lists are so long, can’t even get a doctors appointment and they don’t even want you to visit their surgery. The energy spent on striking is better used on campaigning or getting reform from top to bottom then the pay rises can come and the nhs can remain “free”. Because with the current situation it may well end up privatised. As well they need to reread the Hippocratic oath and remind themselves why they became a doctor / nurse etc. If is because of money then they knew what they letting themselves in for and could have done a different profession. Then let’s not forgot the generous public sector pensions why are better than the private sector. I’ve said all I’ve wanted to say on this topic so won’t be commenting anymore on this.

So you want to get rid of managers, and at the same time do a lot more difficult management stuff. Yeah, that'll sort it. Usual over-simplistic solution to a complex problem.

[Logistix]

Wow, word salad (paragraphs are free by the way)

So much there, and at the same time so little.

You don’t think doctors and nurses are working their butts off trying to improve the system and work with its limitations?

And yet, you still ignore the elephant in the corner, undermine and demotivate the people who actually deliver the healthcare and you will never see any real improvement in the outcomes.

Remind me how critical employees in the private sector are recruited, retained and motivated? Why is it any different in health?

Staff represent the single biggest item of NHS expenditure (45%). Losing trained and particularly senior staff to emigration, early retirement and going part time is bad enough if you can replace them with already trained foreign doctors (which is morally questionable)

If you decide, as the Government seems to that this is the wrong approach, and that actually you need to train your own replacements then it is catastrophically expensive (and takes years).

It’s so obvious, yet apparently so unpalatable to people of your mindset that we are condemned to plod on repeating the mistakes of the past.

Very frustrating.

Edited by Logistix on Saturday 1st July 16:18

[Sheepshanks]

Logistix said:

Losing trained and particularly senior staff to emigration, early retirement and going part time is bad enough…..

If medics were paid twice as much would it make any difference? Salaries abroad would just increase and part-time working and early retirement in the UK would become more economically viable.

[Logistix]

Sheepshanks said:

Logistix said:

Losing trained and particularly senior staff to emigration, early retirement and going part time is bad enough…..

If medics were paid twice as much would it make any difference? Salaries abroad would just increase and part-time working and early retirement in the UK would become more economically viable.

So by that logic you could increase recruitment and retention by reducing salaries?

It’s bonkers, you’re literally using the old argument of ‘to make people in the private sector work harder pay them more while to make people in the public sector work harder pay them less.’

That’s not how economics works.

It is how Government dogma works though which is why we are in such a mess.

Do you apply the same argument to bankers’ pay?

[Slow.Patrol]

Could a system work whereby Drs and nurses get their university tuition for free, providing they contract to work for the NHS for a agreed number of years.

I'm not sure how it would work in practice.

Or maybe we need to go back to the old system of training nurses on the job and putting them up in halls of residence on site.

[Logistix]

Slow.Patrol said:

Could a system work whereby Drs and nurses get their university tuition for free, providing they contract to work for the NHS for a agreed number of years.

I'm not sure how it would work in practice.

Or maybe we need to go back to the old system of training nurses on the job and putting them up in halls of residence on site.

You certainly could, in fact there used to be a nursing nursery which paid £10,000 in funding per year to nurses in training: George Osbourne scrapped it in 2016. It was re-introduced at a lower rate of £5,000 after COVID in 2019.

The trouble is that junior doctors tend to do their FY1 and FY2 (the first 2 years of post graduation work) and then leave a couple of years laterwhen they are approaching specialist registrar level. Any lock in for the first few years would therefore be largely pointless, so you would just be paying them to do something that they are already likely to do, and they would leave soon afterwards. You would create a cliff edge after which people would leave causing chaos for workforce planning. You would be subsidising training up until specialty level and then seeing people take those skills abroad.


Why not do the simpler thing and just increase salaries, surely that's the most direct way to improve recruitment and retention? After all in any other field of employment if you had a shortage of skilled workers, the first thing you would do to try to attract more entrants and to retain existing staff would be to improve pay. The Government seem to view this as uniquely untenable in healthcare, I really don't understand the logic behind this.

It's almost as if they really believe that people who work in healthcare are not subject to the same push and pull factors as everyone else - very odd.

[K77 CTR]

NHS workers still have to have sick certificates from the GP! They have to convince the GP to sign them off. The nhs sick policy is easily found on Google. I have been involved in managing people's sickness and seems pretty robust when related to repeated short term sickness. It's much harder to manage them on long term sick.

I can understand front line having a high rate of sickness, several of my colleagues suffer from PTSD due to the types of jobs they've attended. It's a physically and mentally draining job which might not seem much one job at a time but accumulates over time.

Anyone off for six months that then returns automatically goes back to half pay if they go sick within a designated length of time.

[Logistix]

Notably the only references to retention of existing staff in the NHS workforce plan are to do with career progression and ‘wellness’

Career progression is already very well defined and exists.

Whenever I see our Trust embarking on any ‘wellness’ initiatives (which range from staff yoga, resident poets, endless diversity drives etc) it reminds me of the one thing they are not doing to improve my feeling of wellness working for the NHS which is to pay fairly for the work done. I actually feel less well treated as a result of such insulting token efforts.

It’s almost as if the government wants the NHS to fail, why would they be so incompetent otherwise?

[Sheepshanks]

Logistix said:

So by that logic you could increase recruitment and retention by reducing salaries?

It’s bonkers, you’re literally using the old argument of ‘to make people in the private sector work harder pay them more while to make people in the public sector work harder pay them less.’

That’s not how economics works.

It is how Government dogma works though which is why we are in such a mess.

Do you apply the same argument to bankers’ pay?

I wasn’t arguing, just asking a question.