Auditing absence due to sickness

BMJ 1995;310:195 (21 January)

Letters

Auditing absence due to sickness

EDITOR,--Martin McKee and colleagues highlight some difficultieswith the use of routine data for audit and refer to experiencein obstetrics.¹ In occupational health practice we have encounteredsimilar problems in setting up a system to audit absence attributedto sickness. Certificates for absences due to sickness of morethan seven days are obtained by employees from general practitionersand usually forwarded to the employer's personnel or financedepartment. For self certified spells of illness of shorterduration the information about the reason for illness tendsto be vague. Not all certificates find their way to the occupationalhealth department.

To audit how such episodes of absence due to sickness are managedit is necessary to determine their causes and the extent towhich they contribute to time lost. Trying to code the diagnosiswritten on the Med 3 forms is difficult without an agreed system.We have considered using . . . [Full text of this article]

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