We love this question, because it already means that you aren’t just using occupational health (OH) because ‘someone told you to’ – you’re actually looking to seek value from your OH provider to help you navigate some of those tricky employee relations situations.

Let’s consider what OH actually does.

There are two aspects to the purpose of OH; firstly there’s the clinical assessment (that’s the ‘health’ bit in ‘occupational health’). This means that primarily, these are assessments of employees’ health, including their medical history, medication, symptoms, functional ability, social context and much more. It’s what we, in the industry, call the biopsychosocial approach. Secondly, there’s the consideration of how the individual’s health affects them at work, if at all (that’s the ‘occupational’ bit).

So in other words, occupational health providers are assessing the impact of health on someone’s work.

Why do you need this in HR?

As an employer you have a duty of care to your employees. Legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974), and the Equality Act (2010) make it clear that employers have an obligation to ensure that employee health and wellbeing is being protected wherever possible, and if someone has a disability that you’re doing what you reasonably can do to help the employee overcome any disadvantage suffered as a result of their disability. This is called ‘reasonable adjustments’.

Health can impact someone’s ability to work normally. This could be long-term, it could be short-term. It could be through something easily measurable, such as attendance rates or target-related performance, or something less measurable, like behaviour at work or attitude.

Whatever the case may be, you as an employer need the output from your employees to be of a certain standard. Regular absences, poor performance or unpredictable behaviour can be problematic for an employer, and in these sorts of cases they are typically managed via your internal procedures, such as absence management policies, performance improvement plans and even disciplinary procedures for instance.

However if health conditions, and perhaps even disabilities are part of the cause for this, then you need to consider these before doing any sort of ‘management’ action – the case law on this is very clear. And because you’re (presumably) not a medical professional, this isn’t really something you can do. And you certainly aren’t independent either unfortunately.

So seeking advice from a specialist independent clinician like an occupational health nurse will provide you an independent view on what impact (if any) their health condition is having on their work, and anything you can do to support the employee. It will give a view on what the employee needs (rather than what the employee wants), and help you to ensure you are providing the employee every opportunity to be successful within your organisation.

So in summary, occupational health is providing you independent, clinical advice, that helps to ensure the employee is being treated fairly in relation to their health conditions, whilst ensuring an employer isn’t inadvertently discriminating against an employee or making adjustments that may not even be required.