Respiratory diseases have increased by 172 percent
“On average, employees were absent from work for almost twenty days with sick leave. That is an increase of 38 percent compared to the previous year. Respiratory diseases, which have increased by 172 percent, are primarily responsible for the strong increase.” With these words, DAK-Gesundheit introduces its press release on the Health Report 2022. In it, the health insurance company evaluated the data of around 2.4 million insured persons. The Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) came to a similar conclusion when evaluating the data of around eleven million insured persons, as the Handelsblatt reports: In a supplementary survey, 50 percent of the insured employees stated that they regularly worked ill in their home office. 25 percent of those surveyed (including executives in particular) stated that they also went to the office when they were sick – and this despite the fact that employers are required by law to continue paying their salaries normally for the first six weeks of illness and employees then have their right to sick pay from the health insurance company can claim. At the same time, according to the DAK health report, 64 percent of employed insured persons were absent at least once with a certificate of incapacity for work in 2022.
DAK records the highest number of sick days
The distinction between sick days and sick days with a certificate of incapacity to work is so important because such a certificate usually only has to be obtained from the doctor and submitted to the employer and health insurance company after the third day of absence. The health insurance companies can therefore usually only include cases of illness in their analyzes in which the insured person was not in the office for at least three days. In fact, the difference between sick days with and sick days without a certificate of incapacity to work is getting smaller and smaller: “In the past, we had a certain under-recording of sick days. This effect should now be significantly reduced. Thanks to electronic sick leave, we have a much lower number of unreported cases and even more closer look at the real sickness rate,” the Handelsblatt quoted DAK CEO Andreas Storm as saying. Sick leave is calculated as a percentage of the calendar days in a specific period that employees are absent on average:
Missing days / days per month x 100% = sick leave in percent
With this calculation, the sick leave of the DAK-insured in 2022 was 5.5 percent. This is the highest sick leave since the evaluations began 25 years ago and means an increase of 1.5 percent compared to the previous year. On average, according to the DAK, all employees were absent 20 days a year due to illness.
Healthcare workers sick most often
As the Handelsblatt reports, TK calculated a similar value with its significantly larger database: the sickness rate was 5.14 percent at the beginning of December, which means that the previous high was broken before the end of the year. The working TK-insured 2022 were therefore absent on average 19 days due to illness.
What was striking in the DAK evaluation for 2022, in addition to the high level of sick leave, was the high number of days absent due to mental illnesses: 100 insured persons would have taken an average of 301 sick days due to mental illnesses, between 2011 and 2021 this number was a full 41 percent gone up. However, this is not due to the fact that the work has become more psychologically stressful, but also to a significantly improved sensitivity to the topic of mental health. You also have to take into account that people with serious mental illnesses are often absent not just for a few days, but for several weeks or months, which of course also increases the average significantly. Among all the reasons for issuing a certificate of incapacity for work, respiratory diseases were the most important for DAK-insured persons, followed by musculoskeletal diseases, mental illnesses and injuries and poisoning. At 6.4 percent (+ 1.7 percent compared to the previous year), the highest level of sick leave was recorded among employees in the healthcare sector, employees in data processing were the least ill.
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