"This article presents sickness absence rates by various personal and labour market characteristics from the Labour Force Survey for working-age (men aged 16 to 64 and women aged 16 to 59) employees. It also presents logistic regression analysis, which is a method to combine a range of factors affecting sickness absence to see their effect, and finally looks at other sources of information on sickness absence from work. In the period July 2007 to June 2008, around 5.8 million scheduled working days were lost to sickness or injury, this accounted for 1.5 per cent of scheduled working days. Women and those working in the public sector are most likely to be absent from work because of sickness or injury. "

Support: Paper