Key findings
- IllicitEncounters.com is giving anyone who works in the NHS £20 off membership until the end of October, as a thank you. The code is NHSTHANKS.
- Around 180,000 healthcare workers, most of them women, have joined the site since 2004.
- 61% of the 1,250 NHS staff polled say their working hours have damaged their relationship.
NHS staff can already get money off at the gym, the cinema and half the restaurants on the high street. From today, they can get money off an affair too.
IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, is giving anyone working in the NHS £20 off membership until 31 October, as a thank you. The code is NHSTHANKS at checkout.
Around 180,000 healthcare workers have joined the site since 2004, more than one in ten of all members, and most of them are women. When the site asked 1,250 of its NHS members what their hours have done to their relationship, 61% said they have damaged it.
Dawn*, 44, from Doncaster, has worked nights on a medical ward for eleven years. “We’re married but we live in shifts,” she says. “I get in at half seven and he’s going out the door at eight. We’ve not had a Christmas together since 2019. It isn’t that we fell out. We just stopped overlapping.”
And for anyone picturing doctors and nurses: only 18% say the person they started seeing works in the NHS too.
Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “Everyone else gives NHS staff a free coffee. We thought we’d give them something they might actually use.”
She added: “These are the people who keep the hospitals open at three in the morning. When we asked them about home, nobody described a big row. They described hardly ever seeing their partner. When you only pass each other in the hallway, it isn’t hard to see how someone else becomes the person you actually talk to. So this is our thank you. A cheeky one, admittedly.”
Results
What NHS staff say their shifts have cost them. Percentages are of all 1,250 NHS staff polled. They could pick more than one.
| What the shifts have cost | % of NHS staff |
| Never in the house, awake, at the same time | 46% |
| Missing birthdays, weddings and Christmases | 43% |
| Too tired to talk on days they’re both off | 39% |
| Sleeping in separate rooms because of nights | 30% |
| Plans cancelled when the rota changes at short notice | 23% |
| A partner who has stopped asking how the shift went | 21% |
| Arguing about who gets the weekend off | 8% |
*Name has been changed.
About Illicit Encounters
IllicitEncounters.com is the UK’s largest and longest-running extramarital dating site, established in 2004. The site has over one million UK members and publishes regular research on modern infidelity and relationships in Britain, with expert commentary from sex and relationships expert Jessica Leoni.
Press contact: [email protected]
