Figures reveal scale of NHS staff sickness at pandemic’s peak

Nearly 5,000 days were lost to coronavirus-related sickness at Bath hospitals at the height of the pandemic.

Between March and May this year, one in four days off due to sickness (24.2 per cent) at Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Trust was Covid-19-related.

Overall, 4,939 FTE days were lost due to Covid-19, according to NHS Digital figures, out of a total 20,411 days lost to sickness over the period.

Overall, 4.7 per cent of all working days in March to May were lost to illness, while the proportion of that total lost to Covid-19 alone was 1.1 per cent.

April was the month when the trust was hardest hit - 31.9 per cent of all days lost that month were due to Covid-19, while the coronavirus related sickness absence rate was 1.7 per cent.

Across the NHS in England, 1.3 million days of work were lost due to coronavirus-related sickness between March and May.

This was the equivalent of 22.3 per cent of the 6.1 million FTE sickness days lost during the period across all staff groups in the NHS in England.

The overall sickness absence rate for the NHS in England was 6.2 per cent in April, the highest rate on record.

The figures show 2.3 million working days were lost due to sickness in April 2020, 60 per cent higher than the 1.4 million lost in April 2019. However, the overall sickness absence rate for NHS staff in England dropped to 4.7 per cent in May. During April, there were 690,569 FTE days lost due to Covid19 - 30.6 per cent of the total absences recorded that month.

In March there were 318,140 coronavirus-related FTE days lost to absence, 15.9 per cent of total absences, and in May there were 340,890 FTE days lost to Covid, accounting for 18.9 per cent of all absences that month.

Professionally qualified clinical employees - including doctors, nurses and ambulance staff - had the most FTE days lost to Covid19-related sickness with 758,927 across the three-month period.

This accounted for 56 per cent of total FTE days lost to coronavirus during the period across all staff groups. Of the professionally qualified clinical staff group, nurses had the highest number of FTE days lost to the virus, peaking at 256,053 in April.