Front page story of yesterday’s Times: Fat, unfit NHS staff top the sick league
More than 45,000 NHS workers call in sick each day — one and a half times the rate of absence seen in the private sector.
The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health are having a direct impact on the quality of patient care.
A large body of evidence suggests that health workers tend to have poor health – mental and physical. It’s well known, for example, that doctors have a startlingly high suicide rate. Many causes are cited, including the stressful nature of the job, the long hours, the life-or-death responsibility.
Here’s the strange thing: in almost every other profession, economists worry about well-informed workers (car mechanics, say, or estate agents) using their superior knowledge for their own personal gain. Steve Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) has a well-known paper showing that estate agents sell their own houses for more than their clients’ (by holding out longer for better offers).
So doctors know more about personal health than just about anyone on the planet. When they get sick, they have a wealth of knowledge about the right tests, scans, treatments – even the ‘best’ specialists to see. Based on the estate agent example, we’d expect doctors to have fabulous health. And yet that’s not what we see at all…
P.S. Since I’ve linked to Dr. Crippen’s post on suicide among doctors, I should also note that he’s not at all impressed with the report cited by the Times.