‘Workers are claiming stress to avoid facing disciplinary action’

Jan 2 2008 by Abbie Wightwick, Western Mail

WORKERS are increasingly claiming stress or depression to avoid facing disciplinary action, employers and lawyers claimed yesterday.

A law firm alleged it had become “almost the norm” for employees to get themselves signed off sick if their performance was questioned by a manager.

Emw Law of Milton Keynes said the trend had become a “major headache” for employers and made disciplinary disputes difficult to resolve.

Yesterday the Federation of Small Businesses in Wales agreed that staff faking stress was a growing problem.

But medical leaders said doctors only handed out sick notes for stress in genuine cases and employers also had to take some responsibility for their workers’ health and welfare.

FSB Wales spokesman Russell Lawson said 78% of calls to the federation’s helpline last year were about employment regulations, “a large number of which were to do with people taking time off sick”.

Emw’s head of employment, Jon Taylor, said workers facing disciplinary action often accused a manager of bullying, forcing firms to spend time investigating the complaint.

“It is simply too easy for an employee to get his GP to issue a sick note. We are now seeing this happen in about three out of every five cases, compared with just a handful a few years ago,” he said.

Mr Lawson agreed. “We know of cases where people have tried to play the system for all its worth,” he said.

“I was talking to a small business who had taken someone on for six weeks, who then took the next year-and-a-half off with various ailments and it cost them a fortune.

“I hear of so many cases that I find it hard to believe all are genuine. It is a fair problem. What we have to do is try to separate the genuine cases from those that are not.

“We would not want to point the finger at doctors and say they are not dealing with it professionally.

“What we really need is occupational health centres where employees have to go if their illness is work-related.”

Emw Law suggested that firms should consider getting a second medical opinion if they were not happy with a worker being signed off sick and said they should at least try to find out how long someone will be off work.

“In many cases an independent doctor will actually advise that it would benefit the individual to get the issues resolved,” Mr Taylor added.

But Dr Bailey, chairman of the British Medical Association’s Welsh GP committee, said he did not believe it was a growing problem, although more staff were signed off sick in Wales than England, probably because of poverty and the health-related issues that it caused.

Dr Bailey said doctors should not be blamed for doing their job. Employers should look to their own practices to see if there was anything they could do to improve conditions and communication in the workplace to reduce stress.

“It’s difficult not to be stressed when someone may be going to take your job away,” he said.

“Doctors do have a choice and if they think a patient is genuinely stressed they will give them a note.

“There is a lot of bullying (at work) and that is the stress they come to the surgery with. In that case we are entirely justified in giving them notes.

“I don’t think GPs give out notes just for fun. We give them out because in our professional opinion the patient is not well enough to work.

“We have to be the patient’s advocate. It’s not my job to act as an occupational health service for employers, but to act in the best interests of my patients.”

Dr Bailey said “a significant number” of people in Wales were signed off work with stress but there had not been a growth in recent years.

The average sick leave level across the civil service is 9.8 days a year, and in the private sector six days, according to surveys.