{"id":6227,"date":"2011-06-19T20:39:38","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T20:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=6227"},"modified":"2011-06-19T20:39:38","modified_gmt":"2011-06-19T20:39:38","slug":"driving-examiner-sickness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=6227","title":{"rendered":"Driving Examiner Sickness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This <a title=\"Sunday Mirror - Driving Examiner Sickness\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mirror.co.uk\/news\/top-stories\/2011\/06\/19\/no-show-driving-test-examiners-cost-taxpayer-500-000-a-year-115875-23210220\/\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"color: #800000\">story in the Sunday Mirror<\/a> reports that driving examiner sick days are costing the taxpayer \u00a3500,000 a year.<\/p>\n<p>Just for the record, the number of tests carried out every year is somewhere around 1.8 million. The number of tests cancelled last year was 113,177 (presumably obtained from&#160;yet another freedom of information (FOI)&#160;muck-raking exercise). That&#8217;s less than 6% of all tests booked.<\/p>\n<p>Just doing a bit of scouting around, and there is information suggesting that out of around 1.5 million hospital appointments in Northern Ireland in 2010, 80,000 were cancelled because a consultant wasn&#8217;t available. That&#8217;s just over 5%. In 2009, the NHS sickness absence level was 4.1% &#8211; ranging from 3.4% in London to 4.6% in the North East. Healthcare assistants averaged 6.2%, whereas medical and dental staff averaged 1.1%. Ambulance trusts averaged 5.2%. Strategic health authorities averaged 2.1%.<\/p>\n<p>A look on the Office for National Statistics website shows that national average sickness levels fell from 3.5% in 2000 to 2.5% in 2010. It is obvious that the actual sickness rate for specific professions and jobs varies widely (the NHS ones were those I could find easily).<\/p>\n<p>All you can say is that&#160;driving examiners are at the higher end, but nothing dramatic.<\/p>\n<p>The DSA spokeswoman has it right when she says:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080\">Driving tests are \u00adnotoriously stressful for any learner. But this sickness record suggests that even the examiners are feeling the strain. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I also wonder how many tests are cancelled or not attended by the candidates themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This story in the Sunday Mirror reports that driving examiner sick days are costing the taxpayer \u00a3500,000 a year. Just for the record, the number of tests carried out every year is somewhere around 1.8 million. The number of tests cancelled last year was 113,177 (presumably obtained from&#160;yet another freedom of information (FOI)&#160;muck-raking exercise). That&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-dsa-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}