The setting up of a sickness review as part of the coalition government’s benefits shake-up could “help shine a light” on the obstacles that currently prevent employers from supporting staff during illness and managing absence more effectively.
 

The review led by Dame Carol Black, the government’s national director for health and work and a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, and David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, will consider whether or not more people suffering from ill health could remain in some form of employment with the right help and support.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said that it agreed with Prime Minister David Cameron when he pointed to the fact that a short spell of sickness could all too easily become a gradual slide into a lifetime of welfare dependency.

Ben Willmott, the CIPD’s senior public policy advisor, indicated that the current approach to sickness in the workplace and long-term benefit dependency had for too long been “like a game of snakes and ladders”, with too many snakes and not enough ladders.

“Employers, government, and voluntary and private sector providers need to work together to do more to stop people failing out of work for long periods, and more to provide the ladders out of the pit of unnecessarily prolonged health-related worklessness,” he said.

Moreover, the Work Programme would be undermined if too many employees kept dropping out of work and simply added to the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

As a result, the review could help to “shine a light on some of the obstacles that prevent companies from supporting employee wellbeing and managing absence effectively”, Willmott said.

For example, only a minority of small firms today provided staff with access to occupational health services, even though the evidence suggested that they were the most effective means of helping people with health problems back to work.

“A key issue the review might usefully consider is the issue of encouraging early intervention and referral to specialist support such as counselling or physiotherapy services,” Willmott said. “The absence review can usefully tie up with the recent announcement of £300 million government support to increase access to talking therapies to ensure that employers understand the impact that counselling such as cognitive behavioural therapy can make.”

Katja Hall, chief policy director at employers’ lobby group the CBI, also welcomed the review. “With 180 million working days lost at a cost of £17 billion a year, long-term sickness remains a thorn in the side of many employers, especially for smaller firms. Employers want to help those who are genuinely sick back into the workplace,” she said.