The cure for calling in sick

1 May 2010

/article_images/articledir_11902/5951168/1_listing.jpg

Asking NHS staff to call a medical hotline — rather than their boss — when they feel ill has cut ‘sickies’ by a quarter. Martin Vander Weyer meets the man behind the scheme

The key to Ross’s business model is that he employs experienced NHS nurses, working in the Waterloo call centre or from home, either side of their hospital shifts. They know what they’re talking about, and they provide him with such flexibility (far more of them are needed on Monday mornings than Thursday afternoons, for example) that his cost per call is only around £2, whereas NHS Direct costs the taxpayer £25 per call. ‘I just couldn’t physically spend that much,’ he says.

Throughout our conversation, Ross repeats a mantra that we don’t believe there’s any such thing as ‘a sickie’. Absence management is all about providing ‘a better path back to health’, he says, which is why public-sector unions love it, whatever the spin in the TUC press releases. But it’s also clear that Ross’s system acts as a powerful deterrent to shirking. With 115,000 employees in its database, Firstcare watches in real time as absences blip up to coincide with big football matches or changes of weather. Its monthly data reports for clients identify employees with the most repetitive absence records; in one NHS trust, this highlighted a cleaning team who were taking it in turns, with their manager’s connivance, to collect the maximum six-months’ sick-pay. And it can even spot mass hypochondria: during the swine flu panic, its call-centre screens lit up every time the pandemic-that-never-was made the top of a BBC news bulletin.

According to TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, ‘It’s a myth that there are big, quick and easy savings from new policies that assume sickness absence is mostly skiving.’ But that misses the point Firstcare’s data makes so eloquently. You don’t have to make any assumption about the nature of absenteeism, in the NHS or anywhere else; you just have to manage it intelligently in order to minimise time off work, and there are billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to be saved by doing so.