Our Paediatric workforce information page has an overview of this information along with other workforce and service data; this is regularly updated as and when new data are released.
Introduction
This data deep dive explores publicly available alongside further information provided on request. The data have been extracted and compiled from the Electronic Staff Record (), a live operational system managed by the NHS Business Services Authority (). It contains staff records for all NHS employed staff except General Practitioners (GPs).1 2
Sickness absence rates are calculated using Full Time Equivalent (FTE), the standardised measure of the workload of an employed person. Dividing number of FTE sick days (including non-working days), by the number of available FTE days, provides the percentage of FTE days missed due to sickness, i.e. the sickness absence rates.3
Sickness absence rates in England for all doctors
NHS England provides sickness absence data from four staff groups: professionally qualified clinical staff; support to clinical staff; NHS Infrastructure support; other staff or those with unknown classification. The figures in this section refer to hospital and community health services (HCHS) doctors from all specialties including paediatrics (a subset of the Professionally qualified clinical staff category) and is comprised of: consultants, associate specialists, specialty doctors, staff grades, specialty registrars, core training, foundation doctors Y1-2, hospital practitioners/clinical assistants, and other and local doctors grades.
From January 2018 up until February 2020 rates remained fairly constant, fluctuating between 1.55% in January 2018 (highest) and 1.05% in August 2018 (lowest and also lowest on record).
Figures then spiked in March (2.66%) and April (3.01%, the highest figure on record) 2020, before dropping to 1.14% in August 2020.
Following a subsequent peak in January 2021 (2.03%), figures increased considerably to a from 1.25% in April of that year to 2.58% in January 2022, and continued to fluctuate until April 2023.
As of October 2023, sickness absence rate in England for HCHS doctors was 1.93%, a slight increase from the previous month (1.77%), but lower than a year before in October 2022 (2.11%).
Sickness absence rates in paediatrics: hospital and community health services (HCHS) doctors
The section below looks at sickness absence rates for hospital and community health services (HCHS) doctors that are working in paediatrics. These figures were derived from data provided to the Workforce team by NHSE following a bespoke analysis request.
Overall, sickness and absence rates varied between 1% and 3%, with a minimum of 1.15% for HCHS paediatric doctors and 1.05% for all HCHS doctors, both recorded in August 2018; and a maximum of 2.72% for HCHS paediatric doctors (March 2022), and 3.01% for all HCHS doctors (April 2020).
The monthly sickness and absence rate for HCHS doctors in paediatrics closely follows that for all HCHS doctors between January 2018 and September 2023. As the figure shows, for paediatric doctors sickness and absence remained fairly constant between January 2018 and February 2020, before a spike in early 2020, where rates almost doubled from 1.43% in February to 2.66% (albeit not surpassing the 3% mark seen in all HCHS doctors). This rate drooped in April 2020 from 2.67% down to 1.52% in May 2020 before increasing again between April 2021 and January 2022. More recently, the rate has shown considerable fluctuations.
These trends were mirrored across doctors as a whole. Between August 2019 and February 2021, sickness and absence in paediatric doctors was lower than that for all doctors, but since early 2021 rates have been largely elevated above the all doctors average.
Sickness absence rates by region for HCHS paediatric doctors
This section focuses on yearly averages for HCHS paediatric doctors by NHSE region ie the mean of the monthly values for a given year for each NHSE region.
When considering sickness and absence rates for HCHS paediatric doctors by NHSE regions, from 2018 up until October 2023, 2022 experienced the highest average rate for all regions.
The region with the highest average rate for HCHS paediatric doctors between 2021 and 2023 was the North East and Yorkshire with 1.98%, 2.79%, and 2.28% respectively. In 2020, the North West had the highest rates with 1.76%, while in 2018 and 2019 it was the South West, which experienced rates of 1.75% and 1.66% respectively.
London conversely had the lowest sickness absence rate in 2018 (0.90% the only rate below 1%), 2019 (1.08%), 2021 (1.26%), and 2023 (1.52%). In 2020, the lowest average rate was in the East of England (1.38%), and in 2022 the South East with 1.87%.
