CRAVEN council workers are more stressed out than those working in the NHS according to a recent survey.

A survey of employees at Craven District Council found that 29 per cent of those questioned suffered high levels of stress.

The figure is higher than the general population - 18 per cent of whom apparently suffer from stress - and National Health Service workers with 27 per cent under stress.

However, local council workers do not appear to be as stressed as their counterparts at Bradford Metropolitan District Council with a figure of 42 per cent.

Susan Laycock, the authority's head of human resources, said: "This means that although stress levels are higher than the general population, Craven's results do not stand out as being significantly worse."

Meanwhile employees cited three main reasons for their stress including 45 per cent feeling they did not have enough time to do a good job.

Forty four per cent of workers said they lacked positive feedback and 41 per cent felt they were not consulted enough about changes affecting them.

Miss Laycock added the prevalence of stress differed greatly between jobs with caretaking, cleaning and catering staff suffering the highest levels of stress at 49 per cent. Yet staff in the council's legal and democratic service suffered the least stress at 14 per cent.

The survey also showed that 13 per cent of workers feared violence or abuse from clients and service users, while seven per cent suffered from bullying in the workplace and five per cent were subjected to discrimination because of their ethnic origin.

Miss Laycock added the council was going to take every issue raised by the survey very seriously.

"The analysis generated the response into cool, warm and hot zones - across the whole organisation there were no hot spots. The top three issues raised by employees fell into the warm category. The lowest responses were around discrimination because of ethnic origin and bullying."

Other problem areas included 18 per cent feeling they had to cope with excessive overtime and 33 per cent working in poor conditions. Just under a third of staff who responded also said they felt they had a lack of job security.

Employees aged between 40 and 49 were cited as having the highest stress levels with men being more stressed than women.

Chief executive Rachel Mann said the council would be carrying out another survey in a year's time. She added that stress caused by lack of positive feedback and acknowledgement of work were problems which could be dealt with very quickly.

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