Summary background: Absenteeism is a major cause of loss in jobs, man-hours, productivity, and lives in the health sector. It also has grave consequences for global economies.
Objective: To determine the overall absenteeism rate and the factors that conduces to absenteeism among hospital workers.
Design: Cross sectional descriptive type.
Setting and participants: The entire staff in the hospital was enlisted in the study and data were collected through self-administered and semi-structured questionnaire.
Results: Fifty three percent of the 474 respondents reported at least one absence spell in the year. Absenteeism was highest among domestic staff (70.8%) and lowest among the doctors (46.9%). The average number of spells per absentee per year was 1.7 and the average duration of spells was 4.1 days while the incapacity rate was 7.2 days. The overall absenteeism rate was 1.7%. Absenteeism was significantly associated with increasing age (p=0.000), gender, [females<males (p=0.001)] and with marital status [married<unmarried (p= 0.02)]. Higher rates of absenteeism were recorded among staffs who were stressed (92.1%), not satisfied with the working environment (66.7%) and those who experienced job dissatisfaction (64%). Engagement in physical activities impacted positively on absenteeism (p=0.02). Ill health accounted for 54.6% of absenteeism, with the bulk of it (67.5%) due to malaria
Conclusion: Though the overall absenteeism rate (1.7) was lower than the level of 4 considered to be excessive, 53% of the study population had been absent from work at least once in the study year. There is therefore the need to improve on the social and physical work environment in order to reduce absenteeism among these workers.
Keywords: Absenteeism; Hospital workers; Nigeria.