By Graham Brown

THE FINAL quarter of last year proved a fairly unhealthy one for Angus Council workers.

New data reveals that in the three months from October 1 to December 31, 2004, almost 12,500 working days were lost across the authority due to staff sickness, a rise of over 2000 from the corresponding period the previous year.

Council chief executive Sandy Watson presented the figures to resources and central services committee members at their latest meeting, but said direct comparisons were difficult because of changes to the way employees are categorised.

“It should be noted that the employee categories used differs from previous years,” said Mr Watson’s report.

“This is because the Accounts Commission, for whom these figures were collated for the statutory performance indicator purposes, has amended the definitions as a consequence of the single status agenda which no longer differentiates between APT&C and manual employees.

“These categories are now merged with employees on chief officials conditions of service under the category Local Government Employees (LGE).

“As a result of the re-classification it is only possible to provide comparable figures with the same period last financial year for teachers and the overall figures.”

The statistics showed that in terms of percentage of days lost against available working days, craft workers logged the highest absenteeism at 8.04%, a figure well ahead of LGE staff at 4.86% and teachers at 4.19%.

The teaching staff absence rate was marginally more than the 2003 period, and the overall Angus percentage of 4.71% for the quarter was almost a point more than last year’s 3.82% figure for the corresponding three months.

Translated into days lost it meant 9735 for LGE staff, 37 for craft, 2582 for teachers (as compared to 2453 last year) and 12,354 overall, up from 9988 in October to December 2003.

The average days lost per employee overall was 2.35, up from 1.91. Teachers were absent on average 2.07 days in the quarter (against 1.90 days the previous year), LGE staff 2.44 days and craft workers 4.63 days.

“Absences of one day accounted for 8% of total days lost, absences to two to five days accounted for 23% and absences of more than five days accounted for 69% of total days lost,” continued the chief executive’s report.

“Of the incidences of absences, 37% were one-day absences, 42% two to five-day absences and 21% were for more than five days,” said Mr Watson, adding that the quarter had seen four staff retired on the grounds of ill health.