Occupational health
Sickness absence
Sickness absence costs employers an average of £495 per year in direct costs for every worker employed (source: Health and Safety Executive, September 2007).
Many employees fall sick from time to time, but come back to work well and motivated after a few days' convalescence. The burden of sickness absence for employers is often caused by the minority of staff with:
- long-term sickness absence
- ergonomic injuries that are exacerbated by work
- stress-related problems, especially if these are related to disciplinary proceedings or workplace disputes.
The Health and Safety Executive provides a useful tool for you to calculate the costs of employee sickness absence in your organisation:
See the Ill-Health Cost Calculator
Investigating the causes of absence
Some common factors in high absence rates include lack of high-level management commitment, a culture of inconsistency in which line managers feel unsupported, poor lines of communication with employees and lack of specialised occupational health advice. Black & Banton help you understand whether these factors apply at your organisation; we work with you to audit your current sickness absence rates to identify trends in duration, frequency and cause. We provide a bespoke service which delivers secure advice and support when you most need it.
Best practice in managing sickness absence
Black & Banton work closely with managers to understand the culture of your organisation, its strengths and weaknesses and how best we can synergise our efforts with yours. The aim is to optimise workplace performance and reduce unecessary absence from work. We work with managers to help implement existing sickness absence policies and procedures or help develop new ones.
We provide a nurse-led service which we believe is more cost-effective than a physician-led service. It operates in three ways:
1. a telephone triage system
2. nurse-led sickness absence assessments, with referral to occupational health physicians where necessary
3. home visits, with or without managers and employee representatives
At all stages, we maintain good communication with managers and deliver clear and comprehensive reports quickly, providing solution-focused advice. We prefer to use case-conferencing when a challenging situation would benefit from the input of Human Resources, line managers and other stakeholders.
We provide mangers with the tools to refer employees to our services quickly in accordance with the principles of transparency, fairness and efficiency. We liaise with GPs and consultants at an early stage to accelerate outcomes in individual cases. We provide access to primary investigatory or secondary treatment programmes which fast-track sickness cases, where budgets allow for this.
We advise on effective occupational health solutions, including recuperative return-to-work programmes, which we evaluate in order to ensure that the agreed outcomes are achieved.
