Employees absent due to stress or anxiety (FOI)

Request

How many Government employees were signed off with Stress or Anxiety from 2018 to present year?

If possible please show by department.

Response

For the purpose of this response, any individual with an absence longer than five working days is considered to have been “signed off”. This may not necessarily be a medically certified absence.

If an individual has been signed off from their role multiple times within the same reporting period, they will only be counted once for the purpose of this response. 

Where numbers are fewer than five, disclosure controls have been applied to avoid the identification of any individuals. Article 25 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied. 

Significant activity has been taken by the organisation in recent years to ensure that data on sickness and absences is as comprehensive as possible. This has included several areas of the organisation (such as Childrens Services, Police, Fire and Prison services) which tended not to report centrally but are now covered by current reporting processes.  The impact of staff working from home as part of the organisation’s response to Covid-19 has influenced the levels of absences recorded in recent years, particularly in 2020.  Data quality controls have also brought down the volume of absences recorded without a reason code from 13% of all recorded cases in 2019 down to only 2% of cases recorded in 2023. 

Please see Table 1 of the attached document for the number of staff signed off during 2018 with the key words “Stress” or “Anxiety” *. 

Please see Table 2 of the attached document for the number of staff signed off between 2019 and 2022**. 

Note:

* Data provided from 2018 is based on manual input of absence reasons into a free text field. Any instances where the key words of “Stress” and “Anxiety was identified in the absence reason the individual has been included in the numbers provided.

** Data provided from 2019 is based on the absence reasons available at that time. The absence reason codes only allowed a single category of “Stress/Anxiety/Depression/Other Psychiatric”. There is no way to provide a further breakdown of absences using this category to identify only those items related to “Stress” or “Anxiety”. Data provide from 2020 onwards is based on the usage of the “Stress/Anxiety” absence reason code.

*** Health and Community Services (HCS) is the biggest government department and therefore the numbers need to be seen as a % of the workforce.  Furthermore, an increase in absence due to anxiety has been observed across all health jurisdictions due to the impact of the pandemic on the life of those working in healthcare environments.

Tables 1 and 2.pdf

Article applied 

Article 25 - Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

3)      In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.