Wellbeing | Over 200m working hours lost to medical appointments

More than 200million working hours each year are lost to healthcare appointments, new research has found.

The study, which was conducted by the employee benefits provider Unum, estimated that this figure translated to £900million in paid sick leave.

The survey of 2,000 UK workers found that the average full-time worker spends around 8.3 hours attending healthcare appointments each year. When broken down, this equated to 3.1 visits to their GP and 1.7 visits to specialists – with 2.5 hours of these taken as paid sick leave.

Read more from us

Sustainability | NINE-HOUR work week could save the planet

60% of respondents cited taking time off for appointments as ‘stressful’, while 25% have had to cancel appointments due to increasingly high workloads.