Leave

I'm back after a bit of a holiday. Lots of people have enjoyed a break through the glorious sunshine we've been enjoying. I'm mindful when emails bounced back with "Out of office" messages, or when trying to sort out meetings, just how many people are away at the moment.

With annual leave, study leave and mandatory training, a few months a year are taken out of everyone's working year before Bank Holidays, compassionate leave, carer's leave, sabbaticals, maternity or paternity leave or sickness are counted.

At any one time, over one thousand staff are on some sort of leave and are not in the workplace. A thousand. That's a lot of work not getting done, each and every day.

What piques my curiosity is how everything ticks along quite nicely despite this. If front line clinical staff are away, we feel the pressure very quickly indeed. So much so we plan leave in obsessively meticulous detail specifically so there's usually only one team member away at most in each clinical team.

What of the non-clinical teams? Porters, domestic staff, estates/gardeners and catering are conspicuous by their absence. That still doesn't maker a huge dent in the 1000 staff who'll have been off today. What does is the support services, the finance and IT and HR and corporate services, the management structures. There'll have been hundreds of such staff out of the workplace today.

I wonder how many people noticed . . .