Sickness Absence Management (SAM)
We believe every employer should have a central strategy for tackling sickness absence. It is difficult at the best of times to stop and analyse work absence, how often and the reasons.
It is widely reported that sickness absence costs UK businesses around £12.2bn a year. Reducing and managing this is a mammoth task for industry and a challenge for individual companies. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has previously stated that the leading causes of working days lost through work-related injury or ill health are work-related stress, depression and anxiety.
A well placed Sickness Absence Management strategy would ideally be a package of relating services from Pre-employment Questionnaires, professional employee support & counselling of a full Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), Coaching & Training for Line-Managers on identifying potential problem areas and early intervention, Workforce Health Screening and all the way though to Working Well Audits, Risk Management and a system for tracking & recording absence.
The paramount importance of recording absence is both essential and the platform for any SAM strategy. One of our recommended options now available through Health Matters is ARC: Absence. Return. Care. The ARC platform provided by BHSF allows both accurate recording and detailed interrogation of absence within the business.
Employers can build in trigger dates to case-manage absence, be these follow-up communication, occupational health intervention or sick pay review.
ARC also allows the study of absence patterns by employee and offers challenge to spurious absence in the way it seeks to explore the symptoms of an individual.
This web based system can be implemented for any size of organisation requiring only modest envestment.
Key features of ARC: Absence. Return. Care:
- Enables Line-Managers to take the absence call
- Prompts Line-Managers to ask the correct questions
- Automatically records all details of the absence
- Reminds Line-Managers of rehabilitation solutions
- Automatically produces 'Return to Work' reports
- Access by Human Resources to absence statistics
- Web based - integrates with any system
- Easy to use; requires minimum training
- Set up with your employees and absence policy
- Sympathetic approach supported by staff
