Smokers miss work more often, cost UK billions: study

The report, which appeared in the journal Addiction, analysed 29 separate studies conducted between 1960 and 2011 in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the United States and Japan, with a total of over 71,000 public and private sector workers.

Researchers asked the workers about their current and former smoking habits and used surveys or medical and employee records to track how often they were absent over an average of two years.

Current smokers were 33 per cent more likely to miss work than non-smokers, and they were absent an average of 2.7 extra days per year, according to Jo Leonardi-Bee of the University of Nottingham, UK, and her colleagues.

The researchers calculated that current smokers were still 19 per cent more likely to miss work than ex-smokers, so encouraging smokers to quit could help reverse some of the lost-work trends.

Quitting smoking appears to reduce absenteeism and result in substantial cost-savings for employers, wrote Leonardi-Bee and her colleagues.

The £1.4 billion pounds lost in the UK due to smoking-related absenteeism is only one cost of smoking in the workplace, according to Leonardi-Bee and her colleagues. Others include productivity lost to smoking breaks and the cost of cigarette, related fire damage.

In the analysis, smoking was tied to workers' short-term absences as well as leaves of four weeks or more.

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