Health Care Sector Faces Crisis: Long-Term Absences on the Rise, Personnel Shortages Worsen

The HR service provider Securex sampled 5,800 employees from 1,079 health care institutions such as hospitals but also residential care centers to find out the situation with long-term absence – staying at home sick for at least a year – in the workplace. The results are worrying, said the services company.

Last year, four percent of workers were home sick for more than a year. That is not less than 1 in 25. In 2021 – despite the last corona crimes – there were much less. “The number of people in long-term home health care has increased by 13 percent from 2021,” Securex said. It should be of particular concern that this increase is so significant while ‘ while the figure has remained constant in all other sectors.

Weather bots

“The number of workers who are home sick is at an all-time high in the health care sector. But the difference with other departments has become much bigger in the last two years,” says an HR service provider. The first explanation is the corona pandemic. That period was particularly intense for the health care sector. “Many workers may have continued to work, even though they may have been sick themselves.” But now they are getting pressure on this, it seems, meaning that the high rate of long-term absence. Securex describes it as: “Yesterday’s heroes are cracking today.”

“The corona crisis has turned into a manpower crisis”

Margot Cloet

managing director of Zorgnet-Icuro

Margot Cloet from Zorgnet-Icuro, the umbrella group of Flemish hospitals and health care centers, agrees that the sector is struggling a lot with the after-effects of corona. “Everyone knows that corona has had a huge impact on our department,” she said. “It has been sinking or sinking for months and months. Her all desperate people, but they continued because there was no other choice. And when that storm subsided, many people fell out.”

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A perfect storm

And that was the beginning of a new crisis, says Cloet. “It has been a very difficult exercise to find new people to fill the place of those who have left. In that sense, the corona crisis has quickly turned into a personnel crisis. There is a shortage of people in many places, which has caused a significant increase in the workload for those who can still work.” That also causes more dropouts. The vicious cycle that arises is difficult to break, they admit.

In addition, the aging of the population also means that health care institutions are being questioned even more. All the ingredients for a perfect storm – tired workers, unfilled labor shortages and an aging population – are present.

The number of long-term sick people has always been higher in the health care sector than in the other sectors over the past 15 years. In 2008, the global figure of workers who were sick at home for more than a year fluctuated around 1.5 percent. In health care was already 2 percent. Long-term absence has continued to rise each year, reaching 3.3 per cent for all sectors in 2023. In the health care sector this was then at 4.3 per cent.