Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an estimate of the number of FTE working days lost due to stress-related absences across the NHS in the year to June 2023.

NHS England publishes monthly data on sickness absence of National Health Service staff drawn from the NHS Electronic Staff Record system. This includes high level categories of reason for absence. It is not possible from this data to identify days lost due to stress, but data is collected and reported for the broader category of ‘stress, anxiety, depression or other psychiatric illnesses’. The data shows that between 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2023, there were 6,110,681 full time equivalent (FTE) days lost to sickness absence which fall in that broader category.

FTE days lost may include non-working days as sickness absence is recorded from the day someone first reports sick until they return to work. Information on the days people were scheduled to work is not held centrally, and so periods may include non-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.