Guidance
This guideline covers how to help employees return to work after long-term sickness and how to help people receiving benefits return to employment (paid or unpaid).
NICE has also produced a guideline on managing health in the workplace.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- making initial enquiries about long-term sickness absence
- detailed assessment by specialists
- coordinating health, occupational and rehabilitation services, and return-to-work plans
- support programmes for people receiving benefits
Who is it for?
- Employers and commissioners
- Employees
- People receiving benefits
- Members of the public
Is this guideline up to date?
We checked this guideline in August 2017 and we are updating the recommendations on initial enquiries, detailed assessment and interventions and services. See the guideline in development page for progress on the update.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline was previously called managing long-term sickness and incapacity for work.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.