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Focus On Series


Sick Leave

Sick LeaveAudit Summary

Publication Date:
December 2010

Audit Office:
New South Wales Audit Office

Link to full report:
http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/142/209_Sick_Leave.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y

Audited Entities

  • The Department of Premier and Cabinet
  • 12 public sector departments and agencies

Audit Scope and Objectives

  • To assess whether the NSW public sector met the Government’s sick leave target and sick leave rates are decreasing.

Audit Criteria

  • The Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) has guidelines in place for NSW public sector agencies on managing sick leave.
  • DPC monitors public sector sick leave including trends over time.
  • DPC ensures sick leave results are easily available to public sector Agencies.
  • The NSW public sector met the Government’s 2008-09 sick leave target and the sick leave rate has decreased.
  • Public sector agencies have strategies in place to manage sick leave.
  • Public sector agencies collect sufficient information to enable them to monitor sick leave.
  • Public sector agencies’ sick leave rates have reduced over the last five years.

Main Audit Findings

  • The NSW public sector did not meet the Government’s target, however sick leave reduced by 1.84 hours per person per year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, just over a quarter of a day.
  • Agencies must maintain focus on sick leave. The latest results show no improvement with average public sector sick leave for 2009-10 remaining steady at around 8.1 days per person per year.
  • DPC has guidelines in place to help agencies manage sick leave including how to deal with unacceptable absences. The guidelines do not set an overall sick leave target but advise agencies to set targets and benchmarks to reflect their workplace.
  • To help prevent illness, agencies had adopted healthy workforce initiatives to promote employee wellbeing. This included influenza vaccinations, gym memberships, and employee counseling.
  • Some strategies adopted by agencies to reduce the inappropriate use of sick leave have saved the state money. Based on data provided by the NSW Police Force and State Transit Authority auditors estimate that these agencies together saved almost $20 million over three to five years. This is a good result.
  • Agencies said the key barriers in reducing sick leave were an ageing workforce, an industrial environment which slows workplace reform, and an entitlement culture where staff think they must ‘use it or lose it’.

Audit Recommendations

  • By September 2011, the Department of Premier and Cabinet should help public sector agencies manage sick leave by sharing best practice examples of:
    • agency strategies to reduce sick leave such as return to work interviews, welfare checks, and case managing staff with psychological issues
    • agency analysis of sick leave trends and patterns such as sick leave by weekday to help identify cases of excessive sick leave
    • monitoring sick leave with other human resource indicators including staff engagement to find out what motivates staff to go to work.
  • By February 2011, the Department of Premier and Cabinet should provide agencies with the sick leave rates of all agencies in the NSW public sector so they can compare their performance.
  • By February 2011, the Department of Premier and Cabinet should publish the average annual sick leave rate for the NSW public sector on its website to advise people of the public sector’s performance.