Long Term Stress

Working in the Government is a stressful job at the best of times.  Seriously, it really is. There are so many deadlines and so many conflicting pieces of information, you have to balance what is right against what is popular, against what the latest opinion poll tells you.  Ever Shifting timetables of events, and decisions that have to made that are wrong no matter what you think about.

Which leads us to a very simple question.  Which department has the highest stress levels attached to it.  A good indicator of this would be how many people are on long term sick for stress. The higher the amount of people that are on long term stress, the likelier the amount of pressure that is in their department. A crude measure, but something that we can measure. So I asked all central government bodies the same question:

Please can you tell me how many staff you have, at time of writing, that are on long term sick due to stress.

The answers are:

Name	Amount
Department for Communities and Local Government	8
Export Credits Guarantee Department	0
Wales Office	0
National Assembly for Wales
Welsh Government
Her Majesty’s Inspector of Education	2
Ministry of Justice
Ministry of Defence	190
Home Office	81
Her Majesty’s Treasury
Department of Health	866 - See Below
Department for Work and Pensions	140
Department for Transport	30
Department for International Development	Less than 5
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs	0
Department for Education	Refused
Foreign and Commonwealth Office	Unable
Attorney General’s Office	0
Department for Culture, Media and Sport	Refused
Cabinet Office

A couple of things stucks me as I did this one. The first was that most of them were unable to do give me an answer.  PArt of the reasons for this was because it would have taken too much time, and the other because they didn't know themselves.  Even then this is not the end of the story as some of them didn't know because they put “Stress” into “mental health” category (Which is fair enough when you get down to it, as stress does affect mental health, but there is a whole word of difference between bipolar and stress).

The second things that struck me was how they all recorded their staff information. The department of health did this in DAYS off not staff off.  That’s pretty interesting way of looking at it. IN fact it is probably the best way because it shows how much time has been left off, which could then be drilled into more to see how long the longest period of time were.  Again interesting stuff, eh?