The cure for calling in sick

Asking NHS staff to call a medical hotline — rather than their boss — when they feel ill has cut ‘sickies’ by a quarter. Martin Vander Weyer meets the man behind the scheme

It’s Monday morning and you’re feeling a bit below par. Maybe it was last night’s kebab, maybe it’s the bug that’s going round your children’s school. You ring a workmate and ask her to tell the boss you won’t be in and you’re not sure when you’ll be back. On Tuesday, still off colour, you try to get an appointment with your GP — but the receptionist blames staff shortages at the surgery for not booking you in until Wednesday evening. When you do see the doctor, he tells you to take paracetamol and drink plenty of water — and wearily agrees that it might be sensible for you not to go back to work until Monday.

It’s a familiar tale, in every family and every workplace. It’s not blatant shirking, but it’s a pattern that all too easily turns a minor upset or a major hangover into an un-necessary week off. And survey after survey indicates that it is far more prevalent in the public sector than the private sector, despite recent claims by the TUC that the ‘sicknote culture’ is a myth and public servants are ‘more likely than their private-sector counterparts to carry on working when they feel ill’.

Even if that last assertion were true (the TUC used a rather small survey), absenteeism is a particular problem in the NHS — and if it is not down to what used to be called ‘old Spanish practices’, then you might assume it must be due to the constant exposure of frontline staff to infection. But it turns out to be just as bad among NHS finance assistants, and bizarrely at its worst among staff of NHS Direct, the call-centre service whose operatives never meet patients at all.