Cameron: 'We have to end the sicknote culture'

Bob Dixon

As a private employer I do not recognise this initiative.I deal with sickness or missing employees personally.
Perhaps Cameron is talking about the employees in the Public Sector?
He should leave this to the managers in the Public Sector and if they will not deal with it sack them and appoint managers who can manage.

FvH

Nothing will change on this

More talk the talk not walk the walk

Just like welfare reform getting stuck in the long grass and immigration increasing not decreasing and deficit growing and health reforms in a mess and forests u-turn etc etc

Diane C

Wait for the handwringing ....

Ed P

So some politically-motivated government apparatchik will decide on my fitness to work, rather than a medically-qualified doctor. As Lady T said, "No, no, no".

Austin Barry

Presentation is not one of Cameron’s skills. He personifies a bullying Etonian House Captain, wearing a flashy waistcoat and carrying a cane behind his back. But Miliband is equally hopeless: in Eton terms he is the cowering, rather dim pupil with a speech impediment who should be running Cameron’s bath, preparing his toast and perhaps assuming some more traditional tasks during Quiet Hour.

Daedalus

How can he get so much right like this; and get so many other things so wrong???

Daedalus

Liz Brown

I can already hear the howls of anguish...........

Charlie the Chump

Bob is right, it is management's responsibility to take control of this. If I walk into a company or department and see levels of sickness way above the norm I look at the manager first. It is a simple job to keep accurate records but then you have to act on them, interview persistent offenders, insist on medical checks if necessary and deal with it.

The public services are worst offenders because the quality of management across the board is poor and unions have been allowed to secure the upper hand.

No need for more expensive beauracracy, just get managers doing their job.

tom jones

Hmmm... a biased family Doctor who probably gets on well with the patient and doesn't want to say an uncomfortable truth "you're fine to work, just lazy" or a Doctor who may feel threatened into giving a patient what they want (sicknote after sicknote) vs someone who doesn't know the patient and deals purely with fact/medical issues? I know that I'd opt for the latter. The Welfare bill is huge, but surely people aren't actually getting iller. Given the extra money in the NHS and the dwindling coal mining industry and stuff? People SHOULD be getting healthier not less healthy. Cutting the benefit bill is the right thing to do, but only for those who can genuinely work. It's unfair on those disabled people who deserve benefits if people who should be getting JSA are ripping off the system.

Ian Walker

Ed P - I presume the service would work by taking the medical diagnosis from a doctor, and the job description from the employer, and working out whether they were compatible.

Sounds like an excellent idea to me - at the moment the GPs have to perform the same service and don't like doing it, since they're not experts on what each job entails (and no doubt some of the claimants will embelish their duties when they talk to the doc)

dorothy wilson

Diane C & Liz B: Have a look at the article about this on on Mail On-line. The majority of the comments are critical of DC. Perhaps they are from all those people on "sickies" sitting at home and playing around on their computers!

EC

Brilliant, another Quango!

Thinking of the public services, perhaps its remit should be extended to assessing usefulness and competency. How much are those who actually turn up for work actually costing the country? I would suggest that Dave might then want to get his own administration assessed before starting on the civil service and then local government and the public services.

Adam Nixon

Speccie readers may remember Theodore Dalrymple's convincing piece about doctors issuing sick notes because they are afraid of being beaten up if they refuse. Entrusting the task to an independent service where the doctors are not known to the clients would put a stop to that easily enough.

Tiberius

I'm a little surprised by the comments of my fellow managers above. In cases of long term sickness, there is no possibility of managing the employee positively because he or she is absent.

I've had a few cases; two in particular are worth pointing out, which in my opinion support Cameron's proposed changes.

We had a woman off work for nine months with a "headache", according to her doctor's notes, before we settled via ACAS. She found new employment within weeks of the settlement.

The second case involved a man who went home ill and later presented a doctor's note for "lassitude". He went on to incapacity benefit, left us, and the next contact we had from him was a postcard from sunny Egypt.

The new body must remove the GPs from this cycle. They are compromised by the present arrangements, with the poor employer ultimately paying the costs of all concerned in resolving these disputes.

Austin Barry

Today's London Evening Standard has an encouraging headline of Boris exhorting "let's get these people out of bed!"

Unhappily, he was concerned with drug dealers rather than stressed and fatigued malingerers.

Ellis000

Further to Tiberius. I took over as Head of HR for an International company about 10 years ago. Out of 300 UK staff we had 3 long-term sick employees. One was a lady who claimed she suffered from Repetitive Stress Syndrome, another was constantly off due to her obesity and another from stress. It took me between 6 months and 4 years to get rid of all of them and I must stress none of them were eventually proved to be unfit for work. They cost the company a fortune in wages, company doctors bills and legal fees and in settlements not to mention management and HR time. We were a wealthy company and could afford it but if you extrapolate our 1% problem across the entire UK workforce the numbers and costs are enormous. I was prepared to confront the issue but I can tell you, it ain't easy and we didn't have a union to deal with.

This is a good initiative but more needs to be done to return sanity and equity to the workplace.

Grumpy Optimist

So the official figures show that most have mental problems, not physical. And so I can confidently say (I am a therapist trained in Human Givens and know what I am talking about) that the vast majority of those signed off with mental problems will find that these problems and the labels that are given to describe them will be caused by their lack of work in the first place. The mental problems will then be fed by the fears that they might be forced to worked and feelings that they will not be able to.

A true catch 22 and the medicalisation of their difficulties again just makes it worse.

There is no way that the NHS has the tools or understanding to relieve these problems but can only contain them with medication.

Naomi Muse

I am not sure what the PM is talking about. GPs have not, to my knowledge, signed people off in a sick-note culture. My husband has brain cancer and was signed off a while back but along with debilitating treatments with radio and chemotherapy he has now developed meedically induced osteoporosis and multiple fractures of the spine. This has necessitated his having a brace - a sort of exoskeleton - to enable him to get out of bed with two physiotherapists helping him and sit in a wheelchair. A year ago he was commuting to a high-pressure job in the City. Now he needs help with everything. So much for a sick-note culture.

On the other hand I do understand that public sector people are given days off in lieu of being sick as an allocation. Maybe he should clip this excess and save some money too?

Daedalus

Further to Ellis000, I have had issues with malingers and people who are also off through no fault of their own (other than going to Africa for a holiday). It took about 18 months to persuade one of the malingerers to go. But then my boss came in to ask why one of my staff had been off for 4 months and at the same time to tell me to tell him he needed to pick his socks up or I was to manage him out of the business as well. I had to explain that following picking up a "bug" in Africa he had been in an oxygen tent for a week and in an isolation room for almost 2 months, at one point he was only expected to live for a couple of days. That didn't matter what mattered was he had too long off. When he came back it was on light duties and he could barely cope with that. In the end he left with ill health, but had to be pushed to it. He died 2 months later, not even reaching 60. There have to be massive safe guards about basically hounding people who are genuinely ill, I think the stress went some way to his problems with his recovery. I no longer work for the company either; it wasn't small, 500 employees and had been around for over 170 years.

Daedalus

Tiberius

Naomi; I am very sorry to hear about what has happened to your husband. And Daedalus;

No one is suggesting the genuinely sick are cut adrift, something Cameron himself has confirmed. I'm sure we are all talking about dealing with the serially querulous employees here. It also has to be remembered that there are adverse effects on those remaining in the workplace, who inevitably have to double-up over a period of long term absence..

I would suggest it is usually clear which type of case is being dealt with.

HarryG

Naomi, I also sympathise with what happened to your husband. But you should also understand that this nonsense about public sector people being given days off in lieu of being sick is an urban myth that's been around for years - and no-one has ever provided any evidence of it happening.

By the way, although I agree excessive sick leave is a real problem in some areas, I don't believe the £9 billion figure. The report seems to be guilty of double counting. You can't count both the cost of the sick pay (which is in lieu of the wages the person would have been paid anyway) and the cost of temps etc. At most, sick leave will cost one extra wage, not two.

Frank P

"We have to end the sick-note culture".

Why elevate piss-taking to a 'culture'. Piss-taking is piss-taking. Bit like the culture of inflating MPs and the Upper Chamber expenses: same thing. Piss-taking! Perhaps the Great and the Good should set a good example, rather than making troughing an industry (not a culture, you'll note) in Parliament, municipalities, quangos and then the epitome, the daddy of them all - the Eurotrough, where there isn't even a ballot box to occasionally remove their bureaucratic beaks. Untrammelled troughing by the World's Top Troughers. Except perhaps for the United Nations troughers ... I doubt anybody can cap that level of piss-taking.
What a hypocritical, slimy, pompous, pussy-whipped wanker our Dear Leader is. 'We must end the sick [discordant] note' he strikes every time he opens his hen's-arse-shaped mouth. (Ack. V of this parish).

Herbage

Some comemnts miss the point. Malingering (i.e. faked disability)is a major epidemic in the Western world, costing hundreds of billions per year and adding to national debt. Physicians are totally helpless, ineffective and incapable of stopping this epidemic. They are expected to act as policemen, laeblling those who are faking and committing fraud - but at what cost to themselves? It is nto reasonable to ask them to confront the frauds. If they are, they will not do it and malingering will continue to be widespread and almost totally unopposed. An indepednent review panel, with anonymous memebrs should decide who is unfit and who is malingering to prevent frauds from intimidating the professionals who put the finger on their fraudulent disability claims. Cameron is on track.

Paul Green

Congratulations Mr. Cameron for recognizing a problem that costs the government many billions of dollars per year. The fact is that doctors will never identify people who are fraudulently claiming to be disabled from work because it is inconvenient to them and a risk. Hence, the decision about fitness to work MUST be made by an independent panel. Avoiding work and collecting benefits is a way of life for many in the UK and so it is no wonder that the country has massive debts. Hundreds of published papers show that there is a worldwide epidemic of malingering and now is the time to deal with it; Either that or go bankrupt as a country. Malingerers cost the system in many ways, including overuse of the health care system.