'People are asking for notes more than ever,' says Ottawa doctor
The federal government’s mandate requiring workers to be present in the office at least three times each week may be hurting workers’ health, doctors speculate.
Overall, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) workers took a total of 2,191 sick days between Sept. 1 and Sept. 30 this year, significantly higher than the 1,708 comparable figure in 2023, according to a report from the Ottawa Citizen.
The number of sick days among these workers has been rising in the past years, but the 28% jump from 2023 to 2024 is the most significant since 2020.
According to the report, these workers took the following number of sick days in the past years was:
- 1,477 in 2022
- 1,075 in 2021
- 827 in 2020
Roughly two-thirds of Canadian men (63.4 per cent) and women (65.1 per cent) have access to paid sick leave in 2022, according to data previously released by Statistics Canada (StatCan). And several provinces have made moves to ensure that workers have access to paid sick days.
Return to office brings more requests for doctors’ notes
The required office presence may be contributing to public servants taking more sick days, says Alykhan Abdulla, a Manotick physician, in the Ottawa Citizen report.
“There is no question that this is a much higher magnitude than has actually ever been around,” he said. “Even during the time when people were coming back from COVID, there was a lot of issues with mental health, but these numbers are much greater.”
Recently, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) joined the Canadian Association of Public Employees (CAPE) in urging the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) to conduct a thorough investigation into the federal RTO policy.
With workers taking more sick days, the number of requests for sick notes is also rising, Abdulla said. In the first two weeks of September, he received two to three requests for sick notes. That jumped to between four and six in the following two weeks.
With six other doctors in his office, he estimates the team is getting about 30 requests a week.
“It’s probably the story that we talk about the most — the administrative burden, the burnout and the fact that people are asking for notes more than ever,” Abdulla said, according to the report.
