Hospital appointment during work time

[user789988]

I have an urgent scan next week for a possible cancer recurrence and it will be during working hours, my manager has told me that I will need to work the time back or take it as unpaid as the company do not pay for hospital appointments.
The company do pay for emergency dependents leave so my colleague is taking his wife for a scan the day before and getting paid (also cancer).
Is this normal in work places?

The stress can be incurred in the run up to the appointment. Stop being a twat.

I’m a manager and would 100 per cent given time off in these circs with no expectation for the employee to make up the hours

I’m not being a twat. OP asked about time off for a scan, not for stress.

A mixture of large multi national law firms and mid sized regional law firms. Literally not one would make people take unpaid leave for such appointments or make time up. Admittedly though its because solicitors usually don't work a 9 to 5 but hours as required. But It's nice to see that the law firms that usually get a bad rap are the ones that seem to be more compassionate than other places when it matters!!

You then said when someone said to take it off for stress that she couldn't. She could - stress in the run up and stress that the company is being pretty discompassionate.

Employed by a pretty toxic public sector employer. Even we get paid time off for hospital appointments.

Stress doesn’t normally resolve itself in a single day but the OP could indeed self-certify with stress for the day she needs for her appointment. It’s a trust-based system and is open to ‘interpretation’.

It’s also quite unusual to schedule stress in advance. You wouldn’t normally say today, I’m going to need next Wednesday off for stress.

Ah yes law firms 😊 Makes sense somewhat, also because staff tend to regularly work over hours and because the jobs aren’t regular hours/ more of a work life blend. And all roles would be office roles, with fairly small teams.

One of the reasons why PLCs of a certain type may have a more rigid position is because of the variety of jobs. Take somewhere like Sainsbury’s. They’ll have many corporate staff, but also many shop/warehouse workers/ hourly paid. Some differences in policy are inevitable (working from home) but also the company needs to treat all employees the same as much as possible.

While it’s nice to get paid time off for appointments, it can end up very unfair. Someone may never have any appointments, someone else may have one a week and purposefully always schedule it during working hours. I’m all for treating employees well, but I’m not sure I support paid time off for appointments unless there’s a way to guarantee fairness and consistency.

Many workplaces have various policies for specific health circumstances though that allow for paid time off, such as a cancer policy, Covid policy etc.

If only line managers read them consistently 😋