I'm intrigued...what are everyone's thoughts on the announcement of an intention to reduce GP power to sign individuals off sick?
My feeling is that, at the heart of it, this is barking somewhere in the right forest though potentially up the wrong tree. I've heard OH professionals be amazed that someone is certified "not fit for work" without consideration of reasonable adjustments, and I've heard employees be shocked that they've been offered by a GP to be signed off. Often this shock has been quite upsetting for them because it's signified the beginning of the end of their career and being told you are unable to do something can have a very powerful impact on your actual ability to do it. My career prior to HR was in supporting jobseekers beyond job centre support, and there were so many individuals who were capable of *something* but were told they had "limited capability for work" without being told what work they could do. What a sweeping statement! What it actually often meant was that they had full capability for work but the job roles they could do were limited rather than endless (which is true for many of us on the basis of qualifications and experience).
We also have such a high rate of economic inactivity due to being too sick to work and it doesn't ring true to me that people have got *that much sicker*. Equally, there are plenty of other factors to consider such as the length of time individuals wait for treatment and the quality of that treatment.
I would love to see this implemented well, with a team of qualified OH professionals who, in some cases, specialise in the industries that they advise on. There should be increased emphasis on *reasonable* adjustments and support for businesses to make these - not necessarily financial support, but just with ideas generation as half the problem can be just not being able to work out how.
There are of course many suggestions we could make about access to health services that could support people, but within our own sphere of influence, what are other HR professionals doing to tackle the issue? Or what would you like businesses to do to enable employment, outside of specific clinical intervention?