Assessor should sign off long-term sick leave cases

London: People should be signed off for long-term sick leave by an independent assessor rather than their GP, a government review will recommend.

The independent review, due to be published this week, is also expected to call for businesses to be given tax breaks for hiring patients with continuing and unpredictable conditions.

Welfare Minister Lord Freud said the reforms could lead to "fewer wasted lives". He said the government wanted to intervene earlier to stop patients drifting into unnecessary ongoing state support.

A job-finding service for people with long-term illnesses is expected to be another recommendation of the government-commissioned review.

People who are signed off sick would also be put on to jobseeker's allowance, rather than employment support allowance, for a period of three months. They would receive less money and have to prove they were looking for work.

Freud said GPs would still have a role in writing sick notes for up to around four weeks leave but after that point an independent assessment of the patient's needs should be carried out. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If you start having no support at all for the next 28 weeks there's a very large proportion of people who then drift of into state support and very long-term support and it's quite unnecessary in many cases." Freud signalled that the new independent assessment would consider what work someone seeking long-term sick leave could do and not just consider whether they were able to continue their current job.

Two tests

He said: "GPs are not experts necessarily in occupational health and secondly there's two tests going on — the GP is signing people off for a particular job but actually in the end the assessment will be when they apply for long-term state support. The assessment will be ‘can you do any job?' That difference means that people can fall between the two assessments."

The Independent Review of Sickness Absence, led by Professor Dame Carol Black, the UK's national director for health and work, and the former head of the British chambers of commerce David Frost, is looking at ways of cutting the estimated £60 billion (Dh347 billion) cost of working-age ill health.

Black told the BBC: "What the GPs say is they don't have time to do an in-depth functional assessment and nor have they had any training in occupational health so we think it's providing a new unique service that both employers and GPs need."