NHS Sickness Absence Rates - October 2019 to December 2019, Provisional Statistics

NHS Sickness Absence Rates January 2019 to March 2019 and Annual Summary 2010-11 to 2018-19

In 2021/22, the number of full-time equivalent days lost to sickness absences among NHS staff in England amounted to over 25 million days. From 2009 to 2019, the yearly number of lost days to sickness absence within the NHS workforce in England ranged from 15 million to 16 million. However, from 2019 to 2022, the number of days lost increased drastically in the country.

Annual sickness absence rates of workers in the UK labour market, including number of work days lost, by country and region, sex and age group, and employment type. These are official statistics in development.

In 2024, the sickness absence rate in the United Kingdom's public sector was 3.1 percent, compared with 1.9 percent in the private sector. Throughout this provided time period, the sickness absence rate in the public sector has consistently been higher than that of the private sector.

This report shows monthly numbers of NHS Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) staff working in NHS Trusts and CCGs in England (excluding primary care staff). Data is available as headcount and full-time equivalents and are available every month for 30 September 2009 onwards. This data is an accurate summary of the validated data extracted from the NHS HR and Payroll system. Additional statistics on staff in NHS Trusts and CCGs and information for NHS Support Organisations and Central Bodies are published each: September (showing June statistics) December (showing September statistics) March (showing December statistics) June (showing March statistics) Quarterly NHS Staff Earnings and monthly NHS Staff Sickness Absence reports and data relating to the General Practice workforce and the Independent Healthcare Provider workforce are also available via the Related Links below. This publication features a supplementary file which shows trends in HCHS workforce data observed during the NHS response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Investigations are ongoing into making elements of this publication available ahead of the current schedule. At present it is approximately 12 weeks between the reporting month and the date of publication. Further details will be made available regarding publication outputs when investigations are complete. We welcome feedback on the methodology and tables within this publication. Please email us with your comments and suggestions, clearly stating Monthly HCHS Workforce as the subject heading, via enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk or 0300 303 5678.

This publication provides the most timely picture available of people using NHS funded secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England. These are experimental statistics which are undergoing development and evaluation. This information will be of use to people needing access to information quickly for operational decision making and other purposes. More detailed information on the quality and completeness of these statistics is made available later in our Mental Health Bulletin: Annual Report publication series. • COVID-19 and the production of statistics Due to the coronavirus illness (COVID-19) disruption, it would seem that this is now starting to affect the quality and coverage of some of our statistics, such as an increase in non-submissions for some datasets. We are also starting to see some different patterns in the submitted data. For example, fewer patients are being referred to hospital and more appointments being carried out via phone/telemedicine/email. Therefore, data should be interpreted with care over the COVID-19 period. • Early release of statistics To support the ongoing COVID-19 work May 2020 monthly statistics were made available early and presented on our supplementary information pages. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/supplementary-information/2020/provisional-may-2020-mental-health-statistics • Changing existing measures The move to MHSDS version 4.1 from April 2020 has brought with it changes to the dataset; the construction of a number of measures have been changed as a result. Improvements in the methodology of reporting delay of discharge has also resulted in a change in the construction of the measure from the April 2020 publication onwards. Full details of these changes are available in the associated Metadata file. • New measures A number of new measures will be included in this publication: • MHS76 Count of people subject to restrictive interventions • MHS77 Count of restrictive interventions • MHS78 Discharges from adult acute beds eligible for 72 hour follow up in the reporting period • MHS79 Discharges from adult acute beds followed up within 72 hours in the reporting period • MHS80 Proportion of discharges from adult acute beds eligible for 72 hour follow up - followed up in the reporting period Full details of these are available in the associated Metadata file. • CCG and STP changes A number of changes to NHS organisations were made operationally effective from 1 April 2020. These changes included: 74 former Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) merging to form 18 new CCGs; alterations to commissioning hubs; provider mergers; and the incorporation of Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) into the NHS commissioning hierarchy. The Organisation Data Service (ODS) is responsible for publishing organisation and practitioner codes, along with related national policies and standards. A series of ODS data amendments are required to support the introduction of these changes. This would normally result in a number of organisations becoming ‘legally’ closed including the 74 former CCGs. However, to minimise any burden to the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic and remove any non-critical activity, these organisations remain open within ODS data. ODS aim to both legally and operationally close predecessor organisations involved in April 2020 Reconfiguration on 30 September 2020. Activity may be recorded against either former or current organisations, depending on data providers and processors ability to transition to the new organisation codes at this time. The same activity will not be recorded against both former and current organisations. The impact for the measures presented here is minimal as CCG is derived in the majority of all cases it is used within this publication. NHS Digital are working to understand the implications of this on how you can interpret these statistics and will provide more information in future editions of this publication series. • STP breakdowns not published STP breakdowns for MHS69 are currently absent from the CSV files. These will be included as soon as they are available. The Data Collection Board (DCB) has now approved the decommissioning of the interim collection of Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) waiting times information, known as NHS England Unify Collection within this publication. Waiting times for EIP for October 2019 activity onwards are now monitored using data from the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). From April 2020 NHS Digital has implemented a multiple submission window model (MSWM) for MHSDS which will enable the resubmission of data throughout the financial year. Please be aware of the potential impact of the multiple submission window model on previously published data and use these statistics with reference to it. Further information can be found on the NHS Digital Multiple submission window model for MHSDS webpage linked below. Corrections have been made to this publication on 06 August 2020, 20 August 2020 and 9 August 2021. These amendments relate to statistics published here; the specific measures effected are listed in the Metadata file available in the below link. All listed measures have now been corrected. NHS Digital apologises for any inconvenience caused.