Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many FTE working days were lost in each nursing band, broken down by reason for absence, in the year to June 2023.

NHS England publishes monthly data on sickness absence of National Health Service staff draw from the NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system. This includes high level categories of reason for absence. However, this is not detailed enough to see reasons for absence by pay bands. NHS England has therefore created a bespoke report including pay band information, which is consistent with the published data, for the response to this question.

A table is attached which shows how many full-time equivalent working days were available and lost for nurses and health visitors by Agenda for Change pay band and by reason in NHS trusts and other core organisations in England for the period between July 2022 to June 2023. Due to the way they are recorded on ESR, days lost may include non-working days as the system does not record planned or scheduled working days. It should also be noted that some trusts provide very few reasons for sickness absence, so figures will be incomplete but the best available. In a small number of cases, some registered nurses are coded below the recognised Band 5 entry level. This could be due to different factors such as data quality errors often observed within administrative datasets; for example, some health care assistants may be coded as nurses