Agenda item

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SICKNESS ABSENCE

The panel will receive a report from the Assistant Director for HR and Organisational Development reviewing other authorities’ occupational health and sickness absence.

Minutes:

Councillor Peter Smith, Deputy Leader, and Emma Rose, Head of Health Safety and Wellbeing were in attendance to present a report on Occupational Health and Sickness Absence.  The report provided –

 

  • background information for OH and sickness absence;
  • an overview of the Council’s OH service;
  • details of OH services performance management;
  • information on benchmarking: family group and region (OH investment and sickness); and
  • details of future developments.

 

The Deputy Leader commented that sickness absence was recognised as having a negative impact on productivity and staff morale and work was in hand to improve attendance in a number of ways, such as –

 

  • improved reporting mechanism;
  • tracking emerging issues;
  • enhanced case management;
  • investment in OH (change of provider);
  • improved pre-employment screening;
  • confidential employee assistance;
  • introduction of an employee flu vaccination programme.

 

He further added that whilst sickness levels had reduced by an average of 3.8 days, from 12.8 days per year per full-time equivalent to 9 days, this was still thought to be too high and work would continue to drive this figure down. 

 

In response to questions raised, the panel heard that –

 

(a)

 

a business case had been prepared in respect of the flu vaccination programme which was actually an invest to save scheme.  The cost of the initial outlay for the vaccines would be £4,000 but the total cost would depend on the uptake as the scheme would be voluntary, not compulsory.  The plan would be to target high risk employees in the first instance in order to maintain business continuity and then rolled out to other employees.  It was anticipated that the scheme would prevent up to 60% of employees taking time off sick;

 

(b)

 

a review panel had been established in order to address the top 100 sickness absence employees.  Managers were called before the panel and asked to explain how sickness absence cases in their area had been managed and what additional steps could be taken to improve attendance or otherwise conclude a case;

 

(c)

 

referrals to OH were made within the first four weeks, depending on the case;

 

(d)

 

the Bradford Factor score system was used to monitor sickness absence and this method would look at the total number of occasions of sickness combined with the total number of days off work – the more occasions of sickness combined with a high number of days, the higher the score;

 

(e)

 

whilst figures from the Office of National Statistics indicated that a fifth more of employees taking sickness absence were female, the primary reason for this was not due to childcare issues but due to the nature of the work that they undertook;

 

(f)

 

a breakdown of sickness absence between administrative staff and manual workers was available and could be provided;

 

(g)

 

full absence management training was available to managers, however, a programme of enhanced training to better enable mangers to tackle problems earlier on was also being rolled out;

 

(h)

 

planned sickness absences such as for surgical procedures were included, however reasonable adjustments were made and discussion took place with the employee to bring them back to work as soon as possible event if that meant them taking on a different role until they were fully fit;

 

(i)

 

the authority was not responsible for paying agency staff.

 

Agreed that a further update report is submitted to the next meeting to include –

 

  • the Sickness Absence Policy;
  • the action plan to address the top 100 sickness absence employees;
  • a breakdown of sickness absence between administrative staff and manual workers;
  • information on what the private sector is doing to tackle sickness absence;
  • supporting evidence from the flu vaccination scheme business case.

Supporting documents: