THOUSANDS of working days are lost each month because of staff sickness at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

The trust, which manages Worcestershire Royal Hos-pital in Worcester, the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch and Kiddermin-ster Hospital, has lost more than 7,000 days each month between April and September because of illness. In April 7,287 days were lost, in May this increased to 7,920, in June to 8,017 and July to 8,238.

For August the figure dropped slightly to 7,343, but increased again to 7,969 in September.

At the latest trust board meeting, Nichola Trigg, non-executive director, said by her calculations, this equates to 250 members of staff being off at any one time. "It's a huge cost to the trust," she said.

However, following the meeting, a trust spokeswoman said this figure assumes staff work from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday rather than round the clock, seven days a week. She said a more accurate calculation would be approximately 90 staff off at any one time. The trust employs about 4,200 people full-time.

She added that it was not possible to say how much staff sickness costs the trust, because this is calculated with the expense of replacing staff on maternity, annual and study leave and filling vacancies.

At the meeting Jeff Crawshaw, director of human resources, said the trust was working with another in London which had successfully tackled absenteeism. "We will be using some of their experience," he said. "I agree with you that the level of sickness is not acceptable.

"Our average is well below the national acute trust average, we just need to get it lower."

He said they had also been introducing initiatives that involve telephoning em-ployees at home and doing return to work interviews.