Occupational health & safety wants to push back absences through illness
'Employee should indicate limits'
The Dutch universities promised secretary Hermans to tackle absences through illness. Therefore the UT service Personnel, Labour and Organisation wants more attention for the ill employee, RSI and pressure at work. And personnel should not hesitate to sound the alarm themselves, is the opinion of Eugene van Leer, head section Occupational Health and Safety ('Arbo en Milieu').
Absenteeism through illness at the UT over 2000 was 3.4 percent. Is that high?
'Compared to other universities, no. The technical universities are below the general universities. The average age is higher there and the disease rate reflects that. By the way, we do not know exactly what the actual absence through illness is. Scientific personnel often do not call in sick. They work at home for a day, or leave a little earlier. They are ill, but we cannot tell that from the numbers. A grey area.'
The aim of the memo Policy on Absences through Illness is a decrease of half a percentage point. How?
'A quarter of all absenteeism is work related. This concerns long-term matters like burn-out, stress, RSI, but also conflicts at work. For those people the barrier to return is often very high. It has now been set down in a protocol for the first time. Using that you can track down problems earlier. But people with a spot of influenza are also helped to go back to work earlier by intensive contacts.'
Other solutions?
'Prevention is of course the most important. Our memo 'Gezond en Sterk op het Werk' (healthy and strong at work) tries to get the employee to move. Many complaints are related to the locomotor apparatus. We want to encourage people to move more. Take something simple like taking the stairs. Here at the UT you see that many stairs have been hidden away. For example in the BB-building. People then prefer to take the lift.
We will also do more about the prevention of RSI. We will investigate high-risk places of work. And give more information about it. And where pressure at work is concerned, we are still in the middle of a job satisfaction inquiry. The first results show that people experience high pressure at work. But also high job satisfaction.'
The new plans of the Board of Governors will not decrease the pressure.
'Indeed, more things are continuously added, new programmes, bachelor master, major-minor, schools and institutes. At this moment communication is indispensable to increase support. Much is still unclear, this makes peopleinsecure. When you engage personnel at an early stage, you increase their involvement and people will not settle on an island. But the ball is also in the court of the employee, who should sound the alarm when it all becomes too much, and question his manager. That will prevent friction in the work relationships.'
