Sick of being sick? Maybe we can help
What are the main causes of sickness absence and what can be done about it? asks RSSB’s Niamh McMahon.
Looking to learn more about mental health? Jump to our page on common mental health problems, where you can learn more about depression and anxiety. There are tools to help you out and a link to RED 52, which covers mental health.
If you want to better manage stress, you can find out more and access tips here.
If you’re suffering from back pain, try our back pain myth-busting page.
If you’re after simple ways to exercise, we’ve produced a series of videos with examples of stretches and exercises you can do at work and at home.
Sickness absence rates in the rail industry are well above the national average. The average lost-time rate in rail is 4.07%, compared to just 2.60% across the country. That’s over seven days of absence per employee per year. Why?
This may be an easy question to answer if you’re on the gateline at a busy station, working long shifts on heavy freights, or doing late-night possessions in all weathers. But it isn’t if you’re trying to spot links and patterns—for that, you need numbers. We’re doing something about that.
Over the last few of years, we have been working to collect statistical information on health and wellbeing. We want to take a close look at what’s behind health issues, like we do with safety. In 2024, we launched a Health Insights knowledge hub, with the help of industry. Since 2022, we’ve produced a periodic report to help us plot trends—and that’s where the average lost-time rates came from.
So, again, why is rail’s lost-time rate almost double that for the rest of the country? While it’s a little too soon to provide the complete picture, the biggest known categories in our statistics for both self-reported and occupational health reported sickness absence were ‘anxiety/stress/depression’ and ‘other psychiatric illnesses’ (at 11.58% and 39.3%, respectively). We talked about post-traumatic stress disorder in Right Track 43.
The second and third most reported known reasons for occupational health-reported sickness absence were musculoskeletal problems, at 23.32%, and back problems, at 9.34%. And we talked about that in Right Track 47.
Furthermore, 3.39% of reported reasons involve chest and respiratory problems, while 3.29% involve heart, cardiac, and circulatory problems. However, 20.86% of all self-reported sickness absence is attributed to ‘unknown causes’, which doesn’t tell us anything.
If we’re to get a clearer picture of what’s behind the higher sickness absence in rail, we need you to continue to report on your health and wellbeing data and to report as accurately as possible.
We know stigma, especially when it comes to poor mental health, can be a deterrent to accurate reporting. To make sure we’re getting an accurate overview of what people are experiencing, we’ve run anonymous industry-wide surveys on fatigue, mental wellbeing, and musculoskeletal disorders. Our mental health survey found more than a third of respondents met the criteria for a clinical mental health condition, aligning with data on sickness absence above.
In the box on the previous page, you can find some useful advice to help you manage your health and wellbeing. After all, it’s far better to be off work because you’ve booked leave than to lose time to lost time.
Read Right Track 47
Read Right Track 43
