By Denise Heavey
JERSEY’S government has a sickness bill. It is large, it is growing and, last week, the Jersey Evening Post laid it out in stark figures: £17.4 million spent on employee sickness in 2025 alone, with 85,964 working days lost across the public sector, up from 75,317 the year before. Average sick days per employee climbed from 8.8 to 9.7 in a single year. In the Employment, Social Security and Housing department, that figure hit 12.9 days per person.
Politicians will debate those numbers through the lens of recruitment freezes and departmental efficiency. But there is a conversation nobody seems to be having about what is driving people to breaking point and it starts long before anyone picks up the phone to call in sick.
According to research highlighted in HR Magazine, six in ten workers across the UK arrive at work already fatigued before their day has even begun. Not tired because of their job. Tired because of everything that happened before they got there.
And here in Jersey, for a large and largely invisible part of the workforce, that exhaustion has a very specific source. They are parents of young children, or they are looking after an elderly parent, or increasingly they are doing both at once. They are not employees who struggle to manage their time. They are people doing two full-time jobs, one of which nobody counts.
The people who the data doesn’t see
Think about what a typical morning looks like for a significant portion of Jersey’s working population. The alarm goes off early. A child needs to be fed, dressed and dropped at school or nursery before the working day begins. Or a parent needs support and sleep came in pieces, if it came at all. Some people are managing both: the school run at one end of the day, an elderly parent’s medication and welfare call at the other, and a full professional workload in between.
These people show up. They answer their emails, attend their meetings, and by most measures perform adequately. But performing adequately is not the same as performing well, and it is not the same as being well. What the sick leave data cannot capture is the cumulative toll of operating this way, week after week, month after month, without ever fully recovering. Researchers call it presenteeism: being physically at your desk while running on a fraction of your actual capacity. The body turns up. The mind is somewhere else entirely, running through tomorrow’s childcare logistics, calculating whether a parent’s GP appointment can be squeezed into a lunch break, trying to remember the last time a full night’s sleep happened without interruption.
UK data consistently shows that women, part-time workers and public sector employees carry the highest rates of absence, reflecting the fact that caring responsibilities continue to fall disproportionately on those who have had to adjust their working lives around them. Jersey’s own figures mirror this pattern precisely.
The sandwich generation
Alongside working parents, there is another group carrying an equally invisible load: those looking after elderly relatives while simultaneously holding down careers and raising families of their own. The so-called sandwich generation. Statistics Jersey has documented a rapidly ageing population, and nearly half of all government expenditure in 2024, 48.3% of a £1.79 billion budget went on health, old age and disability support.
The government is spending an enormous sum on the consequences of demographic change while losing millions to the burnout of the people quietly holding that system together for free.
What the numbers are really telling us
The £17.4 million sick leave figure is a symptom. The 85,964 lost days are a symptom.
They are the visible, measurable end of a much longer chain that begins with people trying to hold everything together – children, parents, careers, households – and eventually running out of the capacity to do so. Behind every statistic is a person who gave everything they had and then discovered it wasn’t quite enough.
If Jersey’s government is serious about addressing its workforce costs, it needs to ask harder questions. How many of its employees are also parents managing unreliable or unaffordable childcare? How many are unpaid carers for an elderly relative, absorbing responsibilities the health system cannot? What does flexible working and genuine wellbeing support look like in practice, not just in policy documents and HR handbooks?
The same demographic pressures driving Jersey’s social protection budget upward are quietly depleting the workforce that sustains everything else. The people most likely to be exhausted before they reach their desks are the same people the island cannot afford to lose.
The conversation Jersey needs to have out loud
The £17.4 million sick leave bill will not fall because of another policy document or a well-intentioned paragraph in an annual report.
It changes when businesses and government stop treating working family life as a personal problem employees should manage quietly and start treating it as a commercial and civic responsibility that belongs to everyone.
That is exactly the conversation happening on 10 June at the Royal Yacht Hotel, when IoD Jersey – in collaboration with Mentorhood Jersey and sponsored by HSBC – will host an event titled, Family-Friendly, Profit-Friendly: The Talent Strategy Businesses Need.
This is not a wellbeing seminar. It is a direct challenge to Jersey’s business community: the data is in, the cost is clear, and the organisations that act on it will retain better people, spend less on absence, and build teams that are sustainable. The ones that do not will keep paying, in sick days, in resignations, and in the quiet exodus of talented people who simply could not hold it all together any longer.
Keynote speakers include Jane van Zyl, CEO of Working Families, who will outline the practical, low-cost policies that improve retention and deliver measurable commercial results; Warwick Long, CEO of HSBC Channel Islands and Kate Wright, NED of Mentorhood Jersey.
If you are a business owner, a senior leader, an HR professional or a States Member, and you have read this article and thought “this is real, and we are not doing enough”, then you need to be in that room.
The fact that six in ten of your employees are starting the day already exhausted is not their failure. It is a systems failure, and it is one that Jersey’s employers and government have both the power and the responsibility to address.
Denise Heavey is a recruitment specialist, mediator in training, and former business leader who champions family wellbeing and mental health. Having led businesses and stepped back to raise her family, she understands both commercial pressures and the hidden strain on carers. She is co-founder of Mentorhood, empowering parents through specialist-led workshops and helping businesses build family-friendly policies.
