A lot of employers don’t know what to do when an employee is absent due to an accident at work?
Here are some brief points about what you can do, and
Look after the person
- Show you care – People sometimes worry about visiting the injured person. Regardless of the incident’s circumstances, it’s a team member who is not feeling well – send them a card, or a get well present.
- Keep talking to them. It’s important for a person when they’re recovering to have moral support. It doesn’t mean that you are accepting blame by doing this; it means you care. They’ve even cancelled Jeremy Kyle’s show now, so what are you meant to do with yourself if you’re stuck at home with an injury?
- Don’t leave them out of social occasions– Just because they are not physically capable of carrying out their work activity does not mean they cannot meet everyone for a team social gathering.
- Offer them mental well being support- Make sure the person is supported emotionally, they may suffer from a range of negative emotions, including stress and depression. Either arrange support via Occupational Health or provide employees with private health care, including a mental welfare service.
Stop it from happening again
- Dig Deep– Carry out an investigation to prevent it from happening again. Look at what happened, why it happened and the core reasons. Check out our blog on accident investigation here
- Report it – If an employee is absent for more than 7 days. You need to report the accident to the HSE via RIDDOR. There are other reasons that the absence might be reportable. RIDDOR stands for ‘Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations’. It’s a statutory instrument that came intoforce in 2013 and requires every ‘responsible person’ (most often an employer) to report deaths, near misses, injuries, diseases, and accidents.
- Risk Assessment—Conduct a risk assessment and consider ways to prevent it from happening again and/ or getting worse next time.
- Record the accident investigation – Make sure you record the investigation and what you did to prevent it from happening again. Remember, Accident investigation contains personal information and is subject to GDPR.
Help them back to work.
- Return to Work– Once the employee decides to return to work or receive a fit-to-work certificate, you may need to look at different options for them to return to work. It may be a phased return, a change of duties and a whole host of different actions you need to take. This is one for the human resource team, and we strongly advise you to speak to HR and Health and Safety to ensure the person is treated in the correct and legal way.
There are a lot methods for helping an employee through a period of recovery.
If you’d like to have a chat, please get in touch here
