A recent survey carried out by Jelf shows how UK long term sickness levels have risen by two fifths for most industries which has left many companies calling for tax breaks in order to help them deal with the high costs associated with the dramatic increase of fit notes. The survey shows that 41% of employers have reported an excessive increase in long term absences over the past two years. With manufacturing organisation EEF saying that one in five manufacturing organisation are now having to pay for private healthcare in order to get their staff back to work, as the NHS isn’t doing enough or there are significant delays with appointments.
The most common long term absence problems that were recorded in the 306 firms studied were muscular skeletal disorders and back problems. This was closely followed by medical tests, investigations and surgery. The survey also showed that manufacturing employees on average were taking 5.3 sick days off per annum. The study comes ahead of a green paper due to be published in summer of 2016 on workforce health and is the UK’s biggest business survey on sickness absence to date.