Hi Emma

As you want to compare your company's sickness absence to an authoritative external benchmark, I think you might be better off to use the report as it stands and aggregate your company's sickness reasons into the same categories as the report. It would only be someone at the CIPD who could track down the report's author(s) to find out how they made their decisions and they would then have to disaggregate (if there is such a word) their categories. I would think you would be unlikely to be able to make this happen.

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

Thanks for taking the time to reply Elizabeth, that's certainly the plan ... and that is where I have come a bit unstuck. The categories on the report are so vague, that I'm struggling to decide if some of the illness on my report should be considered recurring, minor illnesses or acute etc. None of the sources I have looked at have such broad categories. It may be that I just have to make a judgement call on where some them should sit and clarify the assumptions I've had to make in my narrative.

Hi Emma

I tend to start with this:

www.iom-world.org/.../saclassn.htm

It was developed in conjunction with the Health and Safety Executive (who also have quite good resources about managing sickness absence on their website)

Kind regards

Jackie

In reply to Jacqueline:

Thanks Jackie, I really appreciate your input. I did look at that yesterday and for a brief moment thought I had found my answer but it pretty much mirrors the current categories on the data I have. The problem is the Health & Wellbeing at Work report has actually over-simplified the categories into:

1. Minor Illness (for example, example colds/flu, stomach upsets, headaches and migraines)
2. Muscoskeletal Injuries (for example neck strains and repetitive strain injury, including back pain)
3. Stress (for example clinical depression and anxiety)
4. Mental Ill Health
5. Caring responsibilities for children
6. Recurring medical conditions (for example asthma, angina & allergies)
7. Work-/non-work-related injuries/accidents
8. Acute medical conditions (for example stroke, heart attack and cancer)
9. Other caring responsibilities (for example for elderly/ill relative)
10. Absence due to non-genuine ill health (unexplained)

So I am currently looking at each illness of my report and trying to decide which of the categories above I should assign it to. Picking out mental health and stress was pretty straight forward, but there are some illness I have no idea where to place - specifically for categories 1, 6 and 8. Translating very specific reasons into very broad ones is turning out to be trickier than I thought, but on the plus side I can cite this as example of the potential problems encountered when bench-marking data.

Many thanks,

Emma

In reply to Emma:

In a moment of clarity, which is odd for a Friday, I've just realised there are other benchmark figures I could use ... such as the ONS which will mean I can stop trying to shoehorn everything into the categories above. Thanks for taking the time to help. :)