Work makes you ill and that's official.

So a Bradford-based recruitment company is launching innovative measures to combat the problem.

Depression, panic attacks, anxiety, headaches, depression and tiredness caused by over-work mean millions of lost working days a year.

Recent research carried out by the Work Life Balance Centre discovered that more than half the people questioned believed they were suffering from ill health as a direct result of their job.

Two out of ten workers questioned said they were unable to cope with their work load.

According to Work Life Balance, which is part of the Work Foundation, a sound mix of work and leisure is good for businesses and provides tangible financial benefits including better productivity, better recruitment and retention and lower absenteeism.

The organisation said organisations such as the London Borough of Camden, which had introduced a work-life balance policy, had reduced absence due to sickness by 2.5 per cent. BT had saved £3 million in recruitment costs.

Now Headway Recruitment, which has offices in Bradford and Leeds, believes it has hit on a flexible solution to employment-related angst.

The organisation, formed 25 years ago, is targeting businesses in both cities with a range of temporary staff packages to reduce the pressure on over-burdened staff.

The company said it could provide temporary staff at short notice because of the large number of people on its books. The staff could be used weekly or monthly to undertake routine and repetitive tasks.

Headway's managing director, David Gill, said: "It makes sense to monitor staff and ensure that they're not continually being overloaded. While it's good to be under pressure some of the time, it's not good to be continually stressed out, which is where our temporary staff can help.

"What happens in Bradford, which has a lot of service industries and financial institutions such as banks and building societies, is that while staff are dealing with customers either face-to-face or on the phone the paperwork falls behind.

"So the stress element is that, at the back of your mind, you haven't done it. So we'll provide people who will go in for a week or a few days to help catch up with that backlog."

Mr Gill said that the culture of temporary work had changed so that today's casual staff were not as disadvantaged as a few years ago and now received sick and holiday pay.

And many, he said, appreciated the flexibility of being able to take a few months off and resume work when they returned.