Unfinished Business

The Scotsman ran an interesting story the other day about soaring sickness levels in the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS).

The full article can be read via this link to The Scotsman, but apparently the service has lost 570,000 hours since June 2014 and sickness levels are running at 7 per cent a year which is much higher than other parts of the NHS or, indeed, the private sector.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/health/sickness-soars-as-ambulance-staff-are-run-ragged-1-3846393

Predictably, one anonymous paramedic put the problem down to workload and long shifts without proper breaks and this message was reinforced by a union official who blamed the rise in sickness levels on a lack of resources and stress.

Now lots of people do stressful jobs yet their occupations don't suffer anything like these high levels of sickness, so I don't 'buy' the stress and resources argument for a moment.

The 12 hour shifts that are so popular in much of the public sector these days may be a factor, but the reality is that the staff and the unions are keen on these long 12 hour shifts because employees consequently work fewer days and have more days off in any given week, month or year.

I wrote extensively about this issue on the blog site a few years ago when there was a dispute in the Scottish Ambulance Service over paid rest breaks.

Seems to me like nothing much has changed and that some big underlying issues remain to be addressed because all that's happened is that the SAS has paid out more public money for ambulance staff to disturb their rest breaks, when necessary, to respond to emergency calls.

Yet the result is that sickness levels have increased dramatically.

Meanwhile ambulance staff and the unions want to have their cake and eat by pressing for fully paid breaks while retaining their very long 12 hour shifts.