Employment: Sickness Absence

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, one of the reasons why this is quite a challenging report that implies quite a lot of work is that we need to reshape the provision for people. I shall give your Lordships a statistic that I find truly shocking. We have one occupational health professional in this country for every 34,000 people. In the Netherlands, there is one for every 4,000 people. That just shows how far we have to go to get provision for people in that position.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

Does my noble friend agree that general practitioners have a critical role to play in the health-at-work policy area? Is it too early to say whether there has been any flow-through from the recent introduction of the fit note certification process on absence rates? Will he give sympathetic consideration to the idea in this very welcome report that we should have an independent assessment service? That would be of signal assistance to general practitioners, who are trying to persuade their own patients that it is often in their own interests to go back to the world of work earlier rather than later.

[Lord Freud]

Yes, my Lords. The recommendations in the report were very supportive of maintaining the GP’s role. The independent assessment service could be a supplement to that, which a lot of GPs would find very welcome in helping to get people back into the workplace.