Richard Tice is having a go at NHS workers

Reform stooge Richard Tice has taken to Twitter to complain about the number of NHS staff who called in sick over 2025. Apparently, health service workers took an average of 19 sick days last year.

And if that doesn’t get you all riled up and right-wingy, 5 of those days were for mental health reasons!  The scandal!

Not that he’d want our advice, but Tice needs to be careful sharing anti-NHS-worker shit like that. After all, people might mistake him for a Labour MP.

Reform privatisation dogwhistle

Here’s some slop for you:

What a regrettably common treat – a Reform tweet with a Daily Mail source. You just know it’s going to contain some proper tripe.

First and foremost, why on earth are we framing the National Health Service as a business? Oh yeah, it’s because Tice and his Reform cronies desperately want to run it as a private business. The point is sustaining a healthy population, not turning a fucking profit – but of course, that’s lost on the likes of Tice.

Nobody mention the pay restoration

For the ‘context’ on Tice’s statistics, we can look to the Mail’s article itself:

Resident doctors will today cause more misery, cancellations and delays with another walkout in pursuit of a 26 per cent pay rise.

The number of sick days taken by NHS staff due to poor mental health has soared by 42 per cent since 2020 and comes amid wider concern about the nation’s approach to such issues.

The NHS in England lost 28million days to staff sickness in 2025, up from 21million in 2020 and higher than in any previous year, according to newly published data.

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Of these, more than one in four – a record 7.9 million – were due to ‘anxiety/stress/depression/other psychiatric illnesses.’

Ah yeah, we’re having a bash at the British Medical Association (BMA) resident doctors’ strike. Cunning avoidance of mentioning the reason for that ‘26% raise’ goal, too.

The workers are striking in pursuit of pay restoration to match 2008 levels. Since then, they’ve suffered massive real-terms pay cuts – down to a low of -32% in 2022. Of course, they can’t let the government get away with that.

How do diseases spread again?

And then there’s the bit about all those lazy doctors taking sick days. I wonder why the people who work around sick people all the time are getting sick so often? Could it possibly be due to the communicable nature of disease? Someone should really start looking into this ‘germ theory’ I’ve been reading about.

Likewise, could the rising frequency of mental health leave have anything to do with the massive strain of NHS work?

Quite apart from the constant pressure of working with sick and dying people day-in and day-out, the NHS is also massively understaffed. As such, the workload of each individual NHS worker is massive – and it’s only getting worse. According to research from the BMA:

The average number of doctors per 1,000 people across the EU members of the OECD, for which data is available, is currently 3.9. Germany has 4.5. England, by comparison, has just 3.2 and would need an additional 40,000 doctors to reach the OECD EU average.

What’s more, those NHS staff are also working with lower resources compared to similar countries. Take hospital beds as an example – the BMA stated that:

Compared to other nations, the UK has a very low total number of hospital beds relative to its population. The average number of beds per 1,000 people in OECD EU nation js is 4.6, but the UK has just 2.4. Germany, by contrast, has 7.8.

Combined with staffing shortages, an insufficient core bed stock means that hospitals are less able to cope with large influxes of patients, for example during winter or periods of high demand.

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Moral panic

The Mail goes on to make (or, at least, write) several points in quick succession – they may even be loosely related to one another:

The health service has lost 151.6million days to sickness since records began in their current form in mid-2019, meaning 6 per cent of all working days were lost to poor health – three times more than the average across all sectors.

Furthermore, the NHS lost 262,592 days to industrial action by resident doctors last year, with the British Medical Association marching its members out on strike in July, October and December.

From yesterday, new laws passed by the Government mean employees are entitled to sick pay from their first day in a job.

Only in the Daily Mail could you get what appears to be a staccato list of shit that sounds vaguely scary to right-wingers. Staff taking sick days! The unions are staging walkouts! Workers get sick pay! It’s like a fucking neo-Nazi Buzzfeed. 

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but again – NHS workers come into contact with sick people. Their absence rates are going to be higher than other sectors. Particularly, that is, given that we’re consistently cramming too many sick people into too little less space. 

Sick leave – important, actually

On top of this, the NHS employment body also highlights that ‘presenteeism’ (turning up whilst sick) can negatively affect both the quality of your work, and the state of your mental health. Given that health workers often make life-or-death decisions, those negative impacts matter.

Likewise, NHS workers also have a duty to stay home if their illness could be transmitted to their patients. This is particularly true given that, by their nature, many of the patients in a hospital are at an increased risk of infection. 

Of course, we can also expand that point out more broadly. If more workers across every in-person sector took sick leave to prevent the spread of infection, the workplace would be safer for everyone – and particularly for immunocompromised colleagues.

Oh would you look at that – we’ve reached the end of the article. I haven’t even made a single crack about Reform leader Nigel Farage never turning up to do his job, but you don’t hear Tice complaining. Never mind, I’m sure it won’t be long til Reform don’t bother turning up to work again. 

Featured image via the Canary