Long Term Sickness Absences Analysis 2019-24

Reference: 25-26367

Date response sent: 18/12/2025

Details of enquiry

1. How many members of staff employed by your organisation have been on long-term sickness absence in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
2. At what grades and functions?
3. How many of these members of staff did not return permanently to work by year
4. How many members of staff employed by your organisation who were no longer able to fulfil their current role has your organisation supported to find alternative roles find alternative roles in other parts of the NHS in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
5. What is the distribution of sickness absence days amongst your organisation’s workforce by percentile?
6. A breakdown of sickness absence in your organisation in 2024 by grade and function
7. Details of what measures, interventions and support has your organisation provided to reduce sickness absence.
8. A copy of your HR policies relating to sickness absence

Response sent

Please find attached our response, as a csv file, to your 8 questions. Where documents are provided in response to questions 7 and 8, these are attached to this email as pdf documents.

The data you have requested for the period, 2019 to 2024 is presented as tables, where we have masked low numbers with the symbol ‘≤5’, which indicates where numbers are equal to 5 or less than 5. The Trust follows guidance by the Information Commissioner and NHS England, established to not provide exact data where the numbers are smaller than 6 as this may lead to identification of individuals.

The Trust has engaged exemption from releasing exact low numbers in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) Section 40(2) (Information which constitutes the personal data of any person other than the applicant, where disclosure would not be permitted under GDPR, thereby breaching GDPR Principle (a): Lawfulness, fairness and transparency.)

As this is an absolute exemption, we do not have to apply the Public Interest Test when engaging this exemption

The Trust recognises a high level of interest from public in how the public purse has been spent on employment and sickness absences, and must balance this against disclosure of any small numbers and the years in which these instances occurred, which – whilst not directly identifying individuals, would nevertheless give rise to a disclosure of personal data, as follows:

• Although the year alone is not personal data, we have also to consider whether other information that is already available, or may become available, to any member of the public, could be combined with the data requested so as to enable identification of the individual(s) concerned.
• There is a high chance of recognition/identification of particular individuals/patients by fellow patients/colleagues and/or others from the low numbers.

This masking of low numbers is not a just a question of considering the means reasonably likely to be used by general public, but also the means likely to be used by a determined person with a particular reason to want to identify individuals from data in the public domain now or in the future, and/or gained from other sources