Sickness Absence Management

Everwell Occupational Health can help you reduce the disruption, loss of productivity and general management time wasted dealing with sickness absence issues.  We can help to facilitate the much faster return-to-work of your employees after a spell of sickness absence than otherwise would be the case if things were left to run their own course.  The early intervention of one of our highly experience Occupational Health professionals, be it an Occupational Health Advisor or an Occupational Health Physician, can produce rapid results. 

A sickness absence referral can lead in many directions such as:

• Advice to employees on what they should be asking their own GP.
• Helping engage other appropriate NHS/GP services.
• Identification of real cause of the sickness absence so the route cause can be tackled (stress at work, a bad DSE set-up, manual handling issues, etc...)
• Suggest onward private consultation to other health professionals such as a physiotherapist or counsellor.
• Identify what reasonable adjustments can be made at work to allow the person to return in some capacity.
• Co-ordinating the employee rehabilitation programme.
• Devising and monitoring a return-to-work programme, phased return or similar.

Any of these directions will help tackle the absence and get the employee back quickly and safely.

However, of course, there are often cases of serious illnesses that cannot be tackled quickly and for these cases a sickness absence review will: 

• Clearly highlight any health issues covered under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) or its replacement the Equality Act 2010.
• Identify that this employee will not be returning in the medium term (or at all) or when they return they will need to be reassigned or some similar variation.
• Give some idea on the timeframe for the particular case.
• Give Management & HR some insight of the health issue and the prognosis. 
• Can identify those cases appropriate for ill-health retirement or similar.

With this knowledge you can then engage with the employee and offer support in an appropriate manner, plan ahead with some confidence and not be wondering what is going to happen every time a sick note is produced.

We offer a full range of sickness absence services from telephone consultations and one-off referrals through to regular on-site surgeries, case management and sickness absence policy development. 

So contact us today to see how we can help you.