Those working in occupational health jobs make the work place safer and healthier for all employees to work in.
According to a report carried out by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development in collaboration with Simply Health, when employers fill occupational health vacancies, conditions are improved for all staff.
The employers were interviewed in order to determine the best way of managing long term absence in the workplace and having people in occupational health jobs seems to be the best way of managing it.
According to an article in Health Insurance Magazine, the number of days an average UK is absent from work in one year is 7.7 days. However, this will also vary from one sector to another and will depend on the type of job they are working in. For example, the magazine claims that an average employee in the media sector will have 3.4 days off which rises to 14.8 days a year for someone working in a call centre environment.
Although the results of the survey show that offering facilities for staff such as counselling services and other levels of support helps reduce the level of sickness, it also shows that more employers are now recording the annual workforce absenteeism rate.
In the article, the magazine claims that every employee could cost their company up to £600 a year through unplanned days off. This may be better managed if there was a better support network in place in the workplace. What is even more promising is that more than 80% of all the employers interviewed said that they believed it was possible to bring the levels of sick days and unplanned absences down. In fact, almost half of all those companies surveyed are already putting a target in place in order to achieve this