Sickness Absence Monitoring in practice:

While accidents at work cost British industry billions of pounds annually, together with the associated down time, sickness absence is often overlooked.

According to a report from the Institute for Employment Studies, most UK firms tolerate an unnecessarily high level of sickness absence. The report claims that many employers still have inadequate approaches to managing absence and blames employers for not having clear procedures to monitor absence or even make it clear to employees that they have to report their sickness.

AMS has developed a successful administering sickness absence programme. Our Sickness Absence Administrator uses copies of the self certificates or sick certificates sent by each company to make entries on our computer database against each employee. The amount of time absent from work is noted and the absences are categorised according to the type of reason given. Once all the certificates have been received and entered for a particular quarter, a quarterly report is compiled and sent to the General Manager.

Quarterly Sickness Absence Reports to Management:

The quarterly reports on sickness absence consist of:

• A bar chart displaying
• The total number of days lost through absence
• The categories of illness
• A calculation of the average length of absence-
• A listing of employees showing
• The dates of absence
• The illness description and
• The classification code
• The number of days lost through absence

Annual Summary Report

Often the patterns of absenteeism and trends towards certain types of illness/ disease are not immediately identifiable in the quarterly reports but can become very clear when analysed over a period of a year. While managers may be aware perhaps that a particular employee is taking a significantly higher amount of time off through sickness, the pattern of absence may not be very apparent. This is where the Annual Summary Report of Sickness Absence can play a valuable role.

The Annual Report has been created as an overview tool in managing absence by showing up some very significant trends and clusters. The Annual Report can highlight patterns of single day absenteeism by individual employees and also accents significant/notable periods of absenteeism by individuals so that employees with chronic conditions are easily identifiable. Specific cases of absence linked to occupational illness or injury are also shown together with absences by disease category.

One of the areas that cause most concern is the single day absences, which cause disruption to production and are apparently unpredictable. However in the Annual Report any employees displaying this type of absenteeism pattern become quite obvious, as do the pattern of their absences -which are often discovered to fall on a particular day of the week. When managers are made aware that absences are not entirely unpredictable then further investigations can be made into the individual's circumstances.

Benefits of Sickness Absence Monitoring

Our computerised database of information gives an employee's

• Medical history
• A record of their health screening test results
• Records of their periods of absenteeism

Access to this information provides an extremely useful resource. Should a General Manager have cause for concern regarding a particular employee he can contact AMS by telephone, fax or letter to request specific information regarding an employee's absence. There is no problem about medical confidentiality regarding the provision of information to management about employees' periods of absence as this is based upon information supplied by the company. However it must be appreciated that in most cases an employee's medical history could not be discussed.

With the aid of sickness absence monitoring long and short term absences can be differentiated and trends highlighted. Persistent short term absences and regular patterns of absence can also be readily identified.

Workplace ill-health is a serious issue with over 20 million working days lost each year in the UK. By monitoring the sickness absence levels it is possible to identify individuals who are taking significant amounts of time off work and to provide evidence for the managers to enable them to investigate the matter further and so achieve lower levels of absenteeism.