We told you we were sick

Why are the numbers so bad?

Call it coincidence or not but on the day I publish an essay questioning the state of the nation’s health, the country’s most watched TV programme features consecutive stories on .. people being sick.

The first one outlined the dreadful number with some form of respiratory ailment, like asthma. The new statistic is one in five. Yep, twenty percent of us sometimes struggle with respiratory disease, a number up from fifteen percent only two years ago.

Simon Mercer’s report for 1 News discussed only one possible reason for the increase - unhealthy homes. For a reporter of Mercer’s experience that’s a cop out. There are far more complex reasons than cold and damp homes for our breathing difficulties, and can we seriously believe that everyone with asthma lives in a substandard home?

It doesn’t take long to find there are multiple likely causes of asthma like allergies, family history and exposure to tobacco smoke. This story was about the statistics so there was no time to investigate possible causes of this increase. Therefore the snarky jab at landlords being able to declare their properties healthy was unnecessary and unhelpful. But hey, any old chance for 1 News to bash the government eh?

Next up on the news, the issue of schools having difficulty finding relief teachers - to cover sick leave.

This year the number of sick days reported by the country’s teachers is 265,483. Last year there were 214,835, so it’s an increase of about 23 percent.

The report didn’t even bother to ask why teachers have so many days off sick. The angle was about having - shock, horror - unregistered former teachers possibly coming in to cover the sick days.

But surely it’s a question for somebody or some organisation to be asking - why are teachers off sick so often? Is the Ministry of Education considering the problem? Are school boards? Are teachers really sick or are they just using the system for a paid day off?

Aren’t they questions worth knowing answers to?

Thinking about those stories on TV reminded me of recent work by Dr Ursula Edgington PhD, an educationalist and sociologist. Through the Official Information Act, she’s unearthed some staggering sick leave numbers from a few government entities.

Medsafe, where the number of staff fluctuates between 70 and 80, had a 58 percent increase in sick leave from 2019/20 to 2021/22. Dr Edgington produced a graph suggesting the number of sick days taken in the 2020 year was around 275. Two years later that number had ballooned to about 445 and last year remained over 450.

Over at the Ministry of Transport, where there’s 180 staff, there were 639 sick leave days taken in 2020. In 2022 that number exploded to 1862 and last year remained crazily high at 1842, as well as a further 809 days taken by staff as leave without pay.

I have one small personal experience of sick workers. My car was at the panelbeaters recently (don’t ask why) and I was told the repair job would take about a week and a half. At the end of the second week the workshop called to say there would be a delay because two of the three panelbeaters in the company had been off sick for a week. My car came back in the middle of the third week. (Great repair job, by the way.)

These are but anecdotal snapshots of various workforces. But they reinforce what I was writing about yesterday. We are not an especially healthy nation and don’t seem to care that we get sick so often.

Isn’t it time we started to care? How can the country’s economy flourish with a workforce that is ill so often? Why is there not more advice about staying fit and healthy, and more people putting that advice into practice?

I just hope we’re not a nation of hypochondriacs and piss takers. That new ten day sick leave provision brought in by the last Labour government won’t have done much for workplace attendance among the less motivated.

Is anyone at the Ministry of Sickness Health listening?

All I hear is crickets.

PS: The headline for this piece is inspired by an inscription on the great Spike Milligan’s headstone: Duirt me leat raibh me breoite which is Irish for “I told you I was ill.”