Sickness absence - FOI Response Register

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from [Authority name].

Can I please have data on sick days taken by employees within your organisation for the last 5 years. I'm aware you are unable to provide personal information so please just refer to each person as Person1, Person2 etc.

Please provide the information below in CSV file format in the following order of preference:

• [Authority name],
• Calendar Year,
• Anonymised Person data,
• Number of days off sick,
• Approx cost of sickness absence,
• Reason (if available)

Please could you provide the information in a CSV file format in this order:

[Authority name], Year, Person XX, Department, Number of Days off sick, Cost, Reason

If any fields are not available or you are not able to provide for whatever reason, please just leave the space between the comma blank.

For the cost of sickness absence, In accordance with FOISA s 17(1), NHS Shetland confirms that it does not hold the information requested. We do not record the cost of sickness absence.

For all other parts of the request, in accordance with FOISA s 16(1), NHS Shetland confirms that it holds the information requested but that it is exempt from disclosure under FOISA s 38(1)(b) as read with s 38 (2A) as the information constitutes personal data and disclosure would breach the confidentiality of the data subjects.

The request is for data arranged/formatted so that each line is an individual episode of sickness absence for an individual staff member. As previously advised, Shetland has a small population and NHS Shetland is a small Health Board with small and single-person services. Therefore, however it might be redacted, NHS Shetland is unable to release data at an individual employee level, due the high risk of identification of individual staff members and the sensitive nature of the information requested.

In case it is helpful, the link below is to a previous FOI response covering aggregated data on reasons for sickness absence by staff group and the attached spreadsheet contains the same data up to the date of your request:

https://www.nhsshetland.scot/directory-record/2506/sick-leave-reasons