“Who the f*** am I?” asks Roni Jones, from Cornwall, four years after the Easter weekend that ended her career.
The former NHS manager, charity chief executive and self-confessed workaholic once dismissed those off work with long-term sickness as “malingerers”, “the worried well” or suffering from “yuppie flu”.
But after she collapsed in her garden in 2021, she was diagnosed with a debilitating neurological condition, adding her name to the growing list of 2.8 million people off work due to long-term sickness.
“There’s always been this negative thing about people who don’t work. And I would have been part of that. Until it happened to me,” says Jones, 63, who lives with multisystem dysautonomia, a condition that causes her “bone-crushing” pain and fatigue.
“I can’t even conceive of being able on a regular basis to get up, get showered and get out of the house – never mind go and do a day’s work.”
Today, there are 800,000 – or 40% – more people of working age who are off work due to long-term sickness than there were in 2019.
The number of working people who report a work-limiting disability has also increased by 30% to 4.1 million in the same period.
If the upward trend continues, absences will cost the economy £66.3bn a year by 2030 in lost productivity, according to a forecast by the Centre for Economics and Business Research and Zurich Insurance.
Adrian Hayter, 61, a GP of 30 years at Runneymede Medical Practice near Windsor, says he’s seen a “rising trend” since the end of the pandemic at his own surgery.
“It’s easy to jump to a very simple conclusion, ‘the sick note culture’ if you like, but actually, it’s very much more of a complex system which has many different factors causing the issues.”
What’s forcing people out of work?
Health issues are striking down the workforce in something of a pincer movement: mental health…
