How many sick days are you allowed to take?

[Abigail47]

In my last job, they didn't really care that much about sick leave. They would let people take up to about two weeks uncertified sick leave, and if you were certified for sick leave, you could take months of sick leave. They also didn't do return to work meetings for sick periods of less that five days.

I only took about four days sick leave in a year in that last job.

I started a new job seven months ago and I'm in shock.

I've taken four days sick leave in the whole seven month period. Two different periods of two days. I was sick. They were uncertified (as I had moved to a new area and hadn't registered with a local doctor in time) and I didn't get paid.

After each period I was called into an office with a manager and made to do a return to work meeting.
I was told in each meeting that too much sick leave can leave to contract termination.

My colleague just took five days certified sick leave, and on her return they said the same to her, that too much sick leave can lead to contract termination.

Aibu to think that four days sick leave in a whole year is not a lot.

Like we are going to get sick . Everyone does.
In one of my sick periods I totally lost my voice with a chest infection. I couldn't speak at all and I have a customer facing role.

What is sick leave like in your organisation?

I went 5 years in my current job without taking a day off sick, and when I did take leave it was for an operation. Still never had a day off for cold/flu.

4 days in 7 months when you should be trying to impress is a lot. Your employer will be wondering how much you will take when you get your feet under the table.

I'd tread carefully if I were you.

I think now with Labour in they are being less strict about it. A lot of this policy was driven by a Tory desire to impress Daily Mail types frothing about people working from beaches. Labour hasn’t opposed the policy as such but they’re much less focused on it.
Honestly until they can do something about the wage stagnation in the civil service they should let people, especially those under the weather, work at home even if means falling below 60% attendance. They’d do well to encourage WFH and sell up or rent some of their office property.

The problem is there are managers who possibly have limited life experience and relish the power over staff

6 months full pay then 6 months half pay up to a year on a rolling period. If you are sick on more than 3 occasions in 6 months then you may be offered a ‘wellbeing plan’. It’s a very good policy.

So your old employer was lax about management processes and your new employer is not…. That’s all I am reading here.

We have a return to work meeting after any sickness, even eg one day with a migraine. Self certify for five days then need a med cert, but we would have six months of sick on full pay then a further six months on half pay.

Three episodes of sickness in a six month period would trigger a meeting with HR, but managers are sensible and can over-ride it. I was signed off with a chest infection a few years ago and came back too soon, still coughing my head off. My manager sent me home and told me to stay off the remainder of the week which would have technically been two separate sickness periods as I had returned to work but he made a note in the system that it was the same illness.

Look up the Bradford Score or Scale. In the NHS and many other public sector organisations there is a formula based on this. Whether it's fit for purpose in the wake of COVID-19 is debatable - if it ever was - but it does mean you can be sanctioned far more for three separate days of migraines, say, than two weeks off with flu. It's why so many of us drag ourselves in when we're less than well.

Now that the WFH gains made during the pandemic are being phased out even in jobs that can be done from home one or two days a week that support is also being gradually withdrawn. Yet training and meeting rooms are oversubscribed and space is at a premium.

Despite extensive searching for the origins of this scale, they remain a mystery. The University of Bradford denied all knowledge when I contacted them some years ago and whatever bright young fit and healthy corporate think-tank members may have come up with it at some obscure conference or other appear to have faded into oblivion.

That number of absences in that time period would usually trigger at least a conversation with the manager though, possibly being escalated to HR or Occupational Health, in the latter under the umbrella of possibly making reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 if it turns out to be a long term condition.

A friend of mine was dismissed for her health record despite the fact that it was the hospital concerned that had largely caused her condition or at least made it far worse. Unfortunately she didn't have the strength to take them to tribunal within the time frame she needed to although she stood a very good chance of winning according to the union.

I suspect there are about to be a LOT of court cases and settlements in the next few years.

@Aconite20 Thats such a shame she wasn’t able to take them to tribunal. I agree there are going to be a lot of court cases and settlements in the near future. The Bradford Scale is very strange IMO and not fit for purpose.

I employ a team of six in my business. They are all treated as individuals and their needs are dealt with as individuals. Blanket policies sound completely mad -although I can see in large organisations they might be used as guidelines. Either you trust people to do their jobs properly or you don’t. If you can’t trust them re abusing sick leave, you can’t trust them period. Having said that you sound as if you have a really strange attitude to work OP. It’s like you are trying to justify gaming the system.

This is nonsense and you really don’t know what you’re talking about I’m afraid.

I write Med 3’s (“doctors’ notes / sick certs”) as part of my job. They are actually called Fit Notes - the emphasis being on whether someone is fit for their normal duties, and if not, we put on there what amendments may be required for them to do some work.

Of course we care what we put on them - we’re signing an official document, and it’s part of our duties to be judicious in their usage.

Whilst I disagree with the posters on here who crow about “‘never taking a day off sick in 40 years blah blah” I feel in each of your posts OP you’ve sounded extremely naive and unworldly, bordering on bratty I’m afraid. If I was your manager I’d actually be breathing a sigh of relief that you were leaving.

Harsh! Why not drag yourself in next time you are ill and they’ll likely send you home- they might not want people spreading infection in the office.

its like covid never happened in nhs
we thought there might a change.
if you have a cold
you are dammed if you do and dammed if you dont.

as said - just stay well, wash your hands and avoid bugs as best you can,

You need a new job….and I say that seriously

My understanding is that SSP is only paid for the first 28 weeks…..so your employer makes up the difference between SSP and your full wage…..after a year you would need to see if you are eligible for esa

I haven't read the whole thread so this may already have been said.

It's not about whether you are genuinely too ill to work. It's about the companies ability to sustain that amount of absence. Companies lose 100's of work hours and therefore money to absence. Take your case, if your company has 100 employees and they all take 4 days absence a year that's 400 days absence they have to manage, I.e. one employee down for over a year
They will have an absence trigger, where a more formal procedure, generally disciplinary will start, there will be first and final warning before termination, unless you are on probation or in your first 2 years of employment, this varies between workplaces.
Reasonable adjustments can be made to triggers for people with underlying conditions, who will be absent more often than someone without a medical condition.

One period of long term absence will be unlikely to trigger but repeated short term absence will.

You have a contractual obligation to do as much as you can to ensure you are fit and capable for work.
If you are off work again it would be looked on much more favourably if you could say, you realise you have had a lot of absence and have done x,y,z about it.
Return to work meetings are a supportive check in to make sure you are recovered, fit for work and to check if there is anything they can do to support you.
They would be remiss, if they didn't let you know the potential consequences of high absence levels
HTH

Return to work interviews are to reduce sickness levels. And they do.

'@Nadeed
Return to work interviews are to reduce sickness levels. And they do.'

How exactly how do they reduce sickness levels?

In my career I took time off sick for:

• major surgery due to long term health condition
• when I had a life threatening episode linked to a long term health condition.

No amount of return to work interview is going to magically make my long term health issues disappear and remove the potential of another crisis.

On my first day back at work after the above life-threatening episode, my manager scheduled a meeting. She did not even bother preparing by reading the fit note I had emailed her the week before where my GP had clearly stated that I could go back to work but only with some reasonable adjustments.

When I pointed this out to my manager and read her the note, she asked me 'yes, but how flexible can you be?' basically asking me to ignore the GP recommendations.

In the end Occupational Health had to be involved and reminded my employer of their legal responsibilities.

My manager trying to force me to ignore the GP's recommendation would have made my health worse, not better.

So much for return to work interviews...they are pointless with the type of employers don't give a damn about staff welfare.

I also think a lot of people commenting on these threads have no idea of what it means to live with disabilities or/and long term health conditions. Or how these silly rules can discriminate against older workers.

But the return to work interviews help other people rather than specifically you and your circumstances. They can help, for example, identify instances where employees are stressed or unhappy at work and using sick days to avoid coming to work.

I wish I had taken my employer (NHS) to tribunal too.
I was treated very badly (I was off for MH reasons), and my manager made it 10 times worse.
He called me up to his office for a "chat" after having time off... to find HR there and it was apparently a formal disciplinary about my sickness absence. I had no notice of this, verbal or in letter form, so was denied the chance to get a union rep there too.
Another time, he told me I had to go round and apologise to my colleagues for having time off.
During my employment, I moved house, and needed a quick reference to confirm that I worked there. The letting agent rang him, and he denied I worked there. He told me he could not give me a reference as they were asking stuff about time keeping, my work etc. The letting agent told me that they literally just wanted confirmation I was on a pay roll, and said he was very rude to them.
I self harm, and he banned me from going onto wards "in case I start cutting the patients", so I could not do my job so was suspended for that. I was also suspended for texting a friend/colleague about feeling low and suicidal. He had the text printed out in massive letters in his office.
I was offered a 10 week stay in a day hospital by the CMHT, and my manager would not let me have the time off. I ended up having a year of therapy instead. In that time, he wrote to the MH trust asking for information on what I was talking about during my sessions. He also wanted written confirmation from my therapist each week that I had attended.
He also rang up Occupational Health and asked for detailed information on my appointments there. One of the doctors gave it to him, and ended up in trouble.
I ended up having a massive disciplinary with 7 people on his panel, with just me, a union rep and scribe on my side. I was in there for over 4 hours.
It was awful and I had a 2 year long final written warning... which I managed.. to then get fired for then calling in sick for an overtime shift.
He let me hand my notice in instead (because they were too short staffed to just sack me) but had me cover someone else's job that I was not familiar with at all... so I made loads of mistakes and was shite at it. Those last 2 weeks were hell.
My exit interview was signing a form that he had already filled in. He had put the reason I was leaving was that I was moving away (not true).
One of my dearest friends that I worked with also had a similar experience. He had bipolar.

Sorry for the essay. This was 14 years ago, and I am still so very bitter over it. I did try to retrain in a totally different role a few later after I left (had to do an Access course/uni). My old manager saw me, came over and looked at my ID... then called the department I was in and basically told them all sorts of crap about me.

Return to work interviews reduce sickness level by effectively bullying staff to come to work when ill.

@Nadeed how is it bullying?

Because it is trying to both informally put pressure on employees, and formally put pressure through the sickness process of setting a maximum number of days sickness that if exceeded could lead to dismissal. It is not simply about staff pretending to be ill when they are not. It directly leads to many staff coming into work when ill.
As someone on the thread posted, UK employees have much less sick days than other comparable EU countries. Given how long people are waiting in the UK for NHS treatment, I don't believe this is because we are healthier.

Someone ringing the sick person everyday goes against every HR rule in the book. It's harassment
Not allowed. How can you be disciplined for being ill. Great case for constructive dismissal here.

Not everyone does get sick though. I had 2 days off sick in my last job when I had a miscarriage. I was there 12 years. My husband owns his business and I can’t remember him ever having a sick day. Both my kids went from year R to year 11 without having a day off sick. I think 4 days in 7 months is a lot . Of course no one can help it if they are sick but you can’t be shocked that employers would be concerned about that amount.

And you can't be shocked that I'm also concerned about my employer.

Employers put employees on probation. Employees also put employers on probation.

They are not what i want in an employer

Hopefully by next year I'll be out if there