The majority of employers do not believe that fit notes work effectively in cutting sickness absence rates, two studies have revealed.
An online poll undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professonials discovered that a huge nine out of ten employers felt that ‘The Statement of Fitness for Work’, which replaced the old ‘sick note’ in April 2010, was not performing its intended job of getting employees back to work as quickly as possible.
But Diana Bruce, the CIPP’s senior policy liaison officer, said that fit notes were intended as a tool “to encourage conversations between employers and employees about how an earlier return to work after sickness could be facilitated”.
Therefore, because managing sickness absence was a challenging and often sensitive issue, keeping communication channels open from the outset, together with clear company policies, should have improved the situation.
This could mean that there was simply a “need for better sickness policies to be put in place at work”, Bruce said.
But a second more in-depth study conducted among 54 organisations and 87 employees by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research appeared to indicate that the problem lay less with employers and more with GPs.
The issue was that, all too often, the information that doctors provided on fit notes was inadequate, comprising only of a series of ticked boxes. This meant that there were frequently no useful suggestions for employers on how to introduce suitable adjustments such as amended duties or temporarily reduced working hours in order to help staff make a phased return to work.
Useful information on how employers could accommodate a given employee’s health condition was also often missing.
To make matters worse, some employers believed that doctors were continuing to use fit notes as if they were sick notes and were simply signing people off work as before.
What they wanted to see, however, was for GPs to make more use of the ‘may be fit for work’ classification and to provide them with more complete information about, for example, the likely duration of any sickness absence and the nature of the incapacity.
Staff, meanwhile, were generally more positive about fit notes and welcomed the various adjustments that their employers had made that enabled them to return to work – rather than just agreeing them in principle, which had been the case in the past.
