annaj

Alright boys, that's enough now. Just stop it. Both of you. I have no idea what the rights and wrongs of your discussion were (and I have no inclination to read it) but the childish, tedious and at times extremely distastful exchange of insults since you arrived in the lounge is making you both look like fools. Apologies for the mum voice, but it needed to be said.

Oh, thank you, that's what I was afraid of. The trailers just all look a bit.... glossy.

Probably way too mainstream for this thread, but has anyone seen The Time Traveller's Wife yet? I loved the book and I'm torn between really wanting to see it and afraid that they will have ruined it.

Ooo that's harsh, Hona, but probably fair. I hang my head in shame ps I'm watching the first ever David Suchet Poirot - The Mysterious Affair at Styles - now, that's no better is it?

Oh God..... The X-Factor auditions.... I know, I know, I hate myself. Every year I promise myself I won't and then MrJ is out and I think I'll just have a quick look and the next thing you know it's the end of a disappointing day in London and Simon's already stormed out once, because it's all just too bad, and then the last audition of the day... it's a cheeky, shy-looking, primary school teacher... the judges aren't expecting much...but what's this? He's brilliant! Simon gives him a standing ovation and tells him it's the best first audition he's EVER heard... And I'm crying.... I am so ashamed.

So, despite the fact that I have focused on nothing but facts, figures and evidence, whilst admitting throughout that there is a problem, I have been called hysterical, emotive, defensive and now misplaced and shrill? Whilst those who have joined the debate with only anecdotes from their own experience, sometimes decades out of date, are being taken entirely seriously. I give up.

Apologies over the "we" I didn't read it as inclusive, my mistake.

Quids, I'm getting really tired of being patronised and called over emotional. I know that PS doesn't just mean NHS, but this thread and the report that started it are about the NHS. I don't know anything about the rest of the public sector and I don't have a report to hand with current figures, so I'm sticking to the topic of the thread and trying to discuss how we can improve sickness in the NHS. I'm also aware that not all NHS workers are clinical, but the report (have you read it?) does focus mostly, although not entirely, on clinical and clinical support workers. Have a look back through my last few posts and tell me, honestly, if what you see is an emotional defence or a discussion of evidence. Please try and listen to what I'm saying. The NHS is an organisation with problems and one of them is a high level of sickness. I see no evidence that the level of sickness is down to skiving, but I do see evidence that it's contributed to by factors intrinsic to the organisation and I would like to know, just as the OP wanted to know although from a completely different perspective, how we can improve that.

I'm happy to admit that the benefits in the NHS are good, namely sickness, maternity and pensions, but I don't see why they shouldn't be. This is a national organisation paid for by all of us (and note that it's us not you, I do pay taxes too) for the good of all of us. All of the benefits are linked to length of service and I think that's how it should be. A doctor, for example, could still earn a whole lot more in the private sector or overseas, so why shouldn't there be some incentive to stay loyal to the NHS? Sickness pay may well contribute to absences though, but not in the way you're thinking. When a nurse goes off sick, for example with an injury or back problem, they are paid their full salary. If they then return to work on restricted duties (office work, shortened shifts or days only) they loose all of their antisocial hours bonus. So, the system is actively discoraging an graded return to work. As I've already said, pressure to return to work after sickness is one of the factors associated with further absence. So, what you're suggesting, that we make sickness benefit less good, is likely to make the situation worse not better as it'll force people back to work before they're fit.

ps what is says in the Telegraph article is true, but they've taken it rather out of context. Doctors are paid a basic salary plus a banding supplement that reflects the total hours worked and antisocial hours. Each job is banded and the supplement recieved is based on the band of the job. It's a fixed and guaranteed supplement. If a doctor is off sick they are paid their full salary based on the basic and the banding supplement, which I think is reasonable because that is the salary the doctor is used to living on and ongoing expenses, like mortgages, will be based on it and will still have to be paid. Nurse pay works differently, as I understand it, the antisocial hours supplement varies monthly depending on how many antisocial hours are worked. So when someone is sick they are paid an avaerage of the last three months, because that probably represents a normal month. I actually don't think that's unreasonable or scandalous.

Quids, I don't think I'm being overly emotional or defensive. I am challenging an assumption that the increased rate is down to skiving and asking people to look at the evidence, so that we can understand why rates are higher and what we can do about it. So, yes, to go back to your last post it does have to be down to one of those three things and I think it's 1. PS work is more adverse to your wellbeing healthwise (although the report is mainly about the NHS so I hesitant to extrapolate to the rest of the public sector. If you look at the section on factors associated with absence working shifts of more that 8 hours, being pressured to return to work and being a carer (away from work) are all factors. Being female is also a factor associated with absence, which may relate to being a carer, as the majority of carers (although of course not all) are female. Since a high proportion of NHS employees are women, this is having a major impact. So, what can be done about all or any of those contributors? I honestly don't know the answer, but the recommendations for improvement in the report focus on developing better occupational health services and staff health initiatives (exercise, stop smoking etc). The report suggest that a blame and bullying culture within the NHS (see, no rose tinted view here) is part of the problem and it strike me that widespread reporting about "lazy" NHS staff will only make that worse. The other thing the report covers is (made up word alert) "presentism" which is working when you're really to sick to do so and it suggests that this is also a major problem. How acurate the figures are I don't know. Statistically and academically I have some concerns about how robust the data is, but in a sense that doesn't matter. This is an important issue and needs to be addressed, I just think it's sad that it's being used as an opportunity to criticise rather than an opportunity to improve. So, to go back to the OP, calmly as I have been throughout, what is the private sector doing differently? Do those of you in the private sector feel supported? Or do you feel bullied and pressured to return to work or work when sick? If you're supported how is this done? Is sickness lower through the carrot of support or the stick of punishment?

So, you are entirely dismissing every contributory factor I and anyone else has raised? You do not accept that there is anything about working in the NHS, rather than another organisation or industry, that contributes to sickness? Have you even looked at the report? There is an important discussion to be had here about the health of workers in the nation's largest employer and improving services for everyone, but it's very difficult to have it if you insist on ignoring the facts.

At no point have I said that the higher level of sickness is ok or doesn't need addressing, what I have said is that there's no evidence that it's caused by skiving. And I still haven't seen any.

Ok, in order to answer some of my questions I've just had a look at the actual report... NHS Health and Wellbeing Interim Report. I'll admit that I haven't read it all yet, but what I have read is very interesting. Firstly, it's worth pointing out this was a report compiled from a survey, a call for evidence and workshops. People who have experienced problems relating to sickness are more likely to take part in a survey about it and so there may (or may not, it's hard to say) be an element of bias and the sample may not be representative of the whole population. Looking at the section of the results of the survey the majority of sickness is due to musculo-skeletal problems, some of which will have been contributed to by moving and handling. As an aside, to answer one of Mr Ben's earlier points about other industries involving heavy lifting, they do, of course, and injuries occur in those industries too. The thing about moving and handling of patients' is that it often happens in emergencies and in less than ideal situations. If a patient faints in the toilet that is where they have to be lifted from even if that means doing an unsafe lift around a toilet bowl. The second most common cause of sickness is stress and anxiety and alarmingly high rates of harassment, from patients, relatives of patients, colleagues and seniors, were reported. Infectious diseases do feature, but not very prominently, so I'll admit I was obviously wrong about that being a major contributor. The pattern of absence is interesting too. Most absences are in the 1 week - 1 month bracket and very few are the single day absences more typical of duvet days. The figures have been compared to current figures for other public sectors industries, with the NHS coming out slightly, but not much, worse than most. They have then (I think, as I say haven't read every word, please correct me if I've misunderstood) been compared to the whole of private industry, not private healthcare, which is where the big headline grabbing 50% comes from. So, now that we have some actual facts, would anyone be interested in a debate about how we can improve the health of NHS workers or do you want to go on with finger pointing and ill-informed generalisation? Edited for typos

Great posts Lulu. But I have to object to this... My first post was entirely calm and if it didn't address your question it's because I'm not sure where your question comes from. What is your evidence, apart from the year you spent as a junior IT working in one organisation, that the majority of the additional sick days are dishonest? Unless you can show some evidence, other than your hunch, that most of the extra sick time is "skiving" then I don't think you're asking the right question and so won't address it. Like Lulu I have worked my entire career, ten years so far, in the NHS and I have never encoutered the culture of a set number of sick days being allowed or expected. I'm not saying I don't believe Quids or TLS, but certinly isnn't true amongst doctors, far from it. Until recently there was a culture amongst doctors that taking a sick day was a failure in some way and letting the team down. When I first started work it was seriously frowned upon to take any time off sick, which is a very unhealthy way to work and is, thankfully, changing. Quite apart from the questions I have already raised about these figures (who is the NHS being compared with and who is taking most of the sick time?) there is another consideration. Simply counting the number of sick days doesn't tell the whole story it is equally important to look at the pattern. In my department the clinical director uses the Bradford score, which is esstentially (this is from memory so if I'm wrong, sorry) the number of episodes squared and multiplied by the number of days. A Bradford score over 100 over a year indicates that there may be a problem - eg. stress, recurrent illness or dishonesty. So, for example, I had two weeks off for an operation, my Bradford score is (1x1)x14 = 14. But if someone else had taken 14 different Mondays off their score would be (14x14)x14 = 2744. And a nurse who has two months off with back pain would be (1x1)x60 = 60. The score highlights the problematic absenteeism without punishing genuine sickness. I'm not saying that the factors I've mentioned account for all the sickness, but they do contribute, and I simply don't see what suggests that most of the sickness is dishonest. And your complaint that responses have been hysterical and rude is, in my opinion, unjustified. I think you brought that on yourself and I think you did so knowingly, you said as much in your second post. You came on deliberately strong in order to provoke a strong response and that's what you got. You're doing the debate equivalent to what I used to do to my older sister when we were children - quietly poke her until she hit me then scream "Muuuuummmm she hit me!"

There are lots of reasons that sickness is higher in the NHS, so of which have already been mentioned, some haven't. Manual handling (ie lifting and moving patients) is a big factor and a lot of sick leave amongst nurses is due to back problems (don't have statistics and don't have time to get them right now, sorry, but they're out there). Exposure to infection and infection control measures governing return to work after potentially communicable diseases are also part of it. Hours do play a big part as well, not just the number of hours but the proportion of anti-social hours. Just to clarify something about the European Working Time Directive, yes, doctors are now covered by it and it means that we work 48 a week on average. But it's the last two words of that sentence that are really important. The EWTD states that over an eight week period we have to work an average of 48 hours or less per week, but there is no limit on how many hours we can work in a single week (well, apart from the obvious that there are only a certain number of hours in a week) and there is no limit on how many hours can be outside of the normal working day. So, for example, last week I worked 62 hours all of them after 5pm and that's completely legal becuase once every eight weeks I have a week off. There is research that has shown that working in the evenings and at night is bad for your health, so it stands to reason that people who work some (or in my case most) of there hours during evenings, nights and weekends will have more sickness. The stress question is always going to be difficult, because no-one wants to feel that their work, and their stresses, are being undervalued. Of course there are stresses in every field of work and I don't think many NHS workers believe that they are the only people experiencing stress, but there is a different (notice that I'm not saying worse) intensity to working in clincial fields. The volume of traffic on this forum during the day demonstrates that most office jobs have at least some downtime and the same really can't be said of clinical work. I work 8-12 hour shifts and usually get a single half hour break in that time. The rest of the time I'm mostly on my feet and I'm mostly in contact with the public. It is intense and it is tiring. There is also the mental stress of dealing with death, mental illness, aggresion and violence, which again is different to that encountered in otehr lines of work. As for the smoking and obesity, well, I think all that the figures show is that NHS staff reflect the general population, which is getting fatter and smokes. To be honest the Times article raises more questions than in answers. Firstly, and most importantly, it's not at all clear who or what the NHS figures are being compared to. It say "the private sector" but is that private health care or other private industry? If it's private health care it's not a great comparison, because the hours are shorter and better paid and there's less acute and emergency work. If it's other private industry it's an even less valid comparison. I would also be interested to know how the figures are broken down, is it predominently doctors, nurses or administrators calling in sick? Personally, I love my job and I think all the downsides are worth it. I also agree that the OP was aggresive, arrogant, accusatory and ill-informed, a year in an NHS office post early in your career doesn't make you an expert. The response to figures like these should surely be to see why this is happening and how it can be helped, not to shout "Lazy Skivers!" and start ranting about taxes. Like BN5 I'm a non-smoker of a healthy weight and have only had two weeks sick leave in years, which was after an operation, so, I hope that's ok with you MrBen. Please keep paying my wages with your hard earned taxes and I'll do my best to keep treating the sick and injured and absorb the thankless criticism from every side.

I haven't been to Joanna's for years, so maybe it's changed, but isn't it quite family friendly at lunchtime? I'm not sure that being surrounded by families and children is quite the sexy, intimate lunchtime atmosphere the OP seems to be looking for!

I'm a doctor and not a parent, so possible viewed as the enemy round here, but I agree with Gubodge. Sleeping young babies on their front is not so much "frowned upon" but known to be a risk factor for SIDS. Obviously, that doesn't mean that every baby sleeping on their front is at risk, or that every case of SIDS is in a baby who slept on their front, but it has been shown (along with having a smoker in the house) to one of the major risk factors. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be alarmist and I'm not criticising, judging or dictacting what anyone does with their own child. Everyone makes their own choices and every parent and every baby is different, but it's worth being informed of the risks. Have a look at the FSID website for more information.

Keef - no heavy petting and no running around the forum. Behave yourself!

I'm definitely a cat person with two cats from Battersea, but I don't think Admin is being unreasonable, Tarah. I have noticed the frequency of your posts and the wanted/offered section does sometime fill up with multiple different posts about rescue cats pushing everything else down the page, which doesn't seem fair. Macroban's suggestion that you have one thread and update it regularly with details of cats for rehoming seems like a workable compromise. This forum is run really well by Admin and the team who are all people with jobs and lives who fit running the forum into their spare time, for free, so we can all benefit. Seems a bit harsh to give them a hard time for not resonding quickly enough and not providing your specific passion with its own section, don't you think?

Also no idea who he is, but I honestly can't imagine rushing for my i-phone to video anyone cycling and shopping in Somerfield on a Tuesday morning (and not just because i don't have an i-phone) Anna_80, I'm happy for you and the joy this has clearly brought you, but I've just don't get it.

Didn't know you were an "upper east side"-er Quids.

No, not even a little bit. Don't read anything into the prompt reply, it's nothing personal.

See, there's good BBW and there's bad BBW. And that was bad BBW. Not funny. Have been up and had a chat, he seemed perfectly nice and reasonable and I'm sure we'll be able to find a compromise of lifestyles. Thanks for all the advice.

Weird. I got home from work to that area in the early hours and didn't hear anything.... But there was a traffic cone on the roof of my car this morning!