Mental Health Emerges as Leading Cause of Sickness Absence at Dudley Council
Recent statistics from Dudley Council have uncovered a significant shift in staff sickness patterns, with mental health concerns now accounting for the largest proportion of sick days taken by employees. The data, covering the first three quarters of the 2025/26 financial year, indicates a notable increase in absence rates per full-time worker compared to previous years.
Rising Absence Rates Amid Workforce Reductions
The council's figures reveal that while the number of full-time staff has decreased from 5,887 in the 2023/24 period to 5,212 in 2025/26, the average days lost to sickness per employee has risen from 8.07 to 9.1. This trend suggests that remaining staff may be facing increased pressures as workforce numbers decline.
During the April to November 2025 period, mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and work-related stress accounted for 11,309 out of approximately 47,700 total sick days. This represents a substantial portion of overall absence and marks a departure from historical patterns where musculoskeletal problems dominated sickness statistics.
Council Leadership Addresses Workforce Challenges
At January's meeting of the Social Care and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee, Councillor Kathy Bayton raised concerns about potential correlations between reduced headcounts and increased workloads for remaining staff. "Going back five or ten years the predominance of absence would have been muscular skeletal and now it is stress and mental health related," she observed during the discussion.
Council Chief Executive Balvinder Heran responded by explaining that feedback from counselling and occupational health services indicates mental health challenges among staff stem from a mixture of factors. "Mental health problems in the workforce are a mixture which can include home-based challenges and caring responsibility pressures," she stated.
Support Measures and Future Outlook
Ms Heran outlined several initiatives the council has implemented to address work-related stress, including retraining programmes focused on better technology utilisation and service automation to reduce manual intervention requirements. She acknowledged recent budgetary challenges but expressed optimism about future improvements. "The last few years have been challenging for the council with the budget situation but finances have been stabilising, so that gives us more to invest in the workforce and we are starting to see those trends turn around," she explained.
Comprehensive Breakdown of Sickness Causes
The council's detailed sickness statistics reveal a diverse range of absence reasons beyond mental health concerns:
- Non work-related stress accounted for 3,315 missed work days
- Muscle, spinal or joint conditions caused 4,266 sick days
- Recovery from surgery led to 4,419 absence days
- Cancer-related absences totalled 2,584 days
- Colds or flu accounted for 2,062 sick days
- Bereavement resulted in 2,017 days off
- Sickness or diarrhoea caused 1,722 absence days
This comprehensive data provides valuable insight into the health challenges facing local government employees in the West Midlands region and highlights the evolving nature of workplace wellbeing concerns in the public sector.
