Workplace Recovery

The latest CIPD Survey for 2008 shows the average level of employee absence is eight days for each employee a year.

Traditionally, employers have viewed Group Income Protection as an employee benefit, providing an income for the employee when they are absent for more than a minimum of usually 13 weeks. While this remains a valued benefit, sickness absence brings disruption to the employer’s business as well as increased costs of recruiting temporary cover for an uncertain and indefinite period. Our emphasis is not just paying a cheque. While making a benefit payment where necessary, we see our role as helping the employer minimise disruption by getting the absent employee back into the workplace as soon as possible. This helps keep costs of absence to a minimum.

We believe we’ve the tools and expertise to do this.

Benefits Management

When an employee covered by a Group Income Protection policy is off work for more than four weeks it’s essential the employer tells us as soon as possible. The sooner this happens the sooner we can start assessment and possible treatment to help the employee back to work.

We recognise that sometimes additional processes need to be established so that we can be notified of absences at the appropriate time. That’s why we’ve taken the initiative to incentivise employers that insure over 250 staff, and give them the opportunity to get 5% cash back.

All they need to do is notify us of at least 80% of long term absences (those over four weeks) by the sixth week of absence, and at the end of bonus period, we’ll send a cheque for 5% of the previous years premium.

Read more about Cash back early notification bonus

In association with the Rood Lane Medical Group we’re able to offer discounted Sickness Absence Management (SAM) to provide an integrated absence management solution when combined with Group Income Protection from Legal & General.

Optional discounted modules consist of Inform, a call centre based sickness absence reporting system for day one absence and/or Occupational Health Case Management to provide a total absence management solution.

In recent years we’ve seen a huge increase in stress related claims, which have now overtaken the more traditional musculoskeletal injuries as the most common type of claim, particularly for non manual workers.

These types of psychological conditions need specialist treatment.

Our approach to stress related claims is proactive and built on early intervention and expert personalised assistance. This involves Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which is widely regarded as the NHS treatment of choice for this condition. CBT is a short term, problem focused, goal directed, evidence based psychological treatment. We’ve an exclusive arrangement with CBT Services Ltd who work with us to identify, analyse and treat those cases and our experience shows this results in about 60% of cases returning to work.

For more details download our new Stress Bulletin.

Our approach is to provide the most suitable treatment for each individual case. This is why we don’t use in house resources but use a panel of independent experts to offer specialist treatment and return to work pathways according to the needs of the individual.

We can also offer several optional discounted stress risk assessments and stress training programmes provided by the Rood Lane Medical Group.

Rehabilitation and work reintegration

Our Benefit Managers and Medical Underwriting Team are developing their expertise and expanding their knowledge of key medical conditions.

Centres of Excellence