Occupational Sick Scheme

Use this window to create your organization’s occupational sickness schemes. A scheme defines the allowance for employees who qualify for the scheme, depending on the qualifying conditions defined in the scheme.

An organization can have several categories of employees, such as teaching staff and support staff, and different categories can be entitled to different sickness pay allowances. In an HR record, your organization might use a different field to other organizations to identify the categories to which your employees belong. Because organizations vary in how they categorize their employees, the system needs to know how to identify employees who might qualify for occupational sick payments. When you create an occupational sickness scheme, you can specify a qualifying query that selects a group of employees who qualify for that scheme. For example, you can create and specify a qualifying query that selects all your non-teaching staff.

Employees qualify for a defined occupational sickness scheme only when they satisfy two key conditions:

  • Qualifying Query. This query identifies the group of employees who might qualify for the scheme.
  • Qualifying Months. This is the period, expressed in the number of months, that an employee must be employed by your organization to qualify for the scheme.

In many organizations, employees might have transferred into an organization from another, under TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings — Protection for Employment) regulations. For this reason, an employee’s original employment date might be substantially different from the start date of employment in the new organization. When you create the details for a scheme, you have to specify whether the original employment start date or the service date is used to determine whether an employee qualifies for the scheme.

The type of duration for a scheme is either working or calendar days. A scheme that uses calendar days does not prorate the sickness allowance. For example, in such a scheme, an employee who normally works at .4 WTE (whole time equivalent), working two days a week, who is off sick for a whole month, would use up the same sickness allowance as someone who normally works full-time and is off sick for the same period. If the scheme is based on working days, the system prorates allowances. For example, an employee who worked .4 WTE might use up 8 days and the full-time employee might use up 20 days. Therefore, for a scheme based on working days, you select the WTE setting to prorate the allowances based on the employee’s WTE. This can mean, for example, that a .5 WTE employee has 65 days’ allowance at full pay and the full-time employee has 130 days.

You must click Save to save the details on the Scheme tab before you can define the allowances for the scheme on the Progression tab.

To delete an existing scheme, select the scheme, and click Delete. The Occupational Sick Scheme window is displayed, which displays the details for the scheme on the Scheme tab. Click Delete to confirm you want to delete the scheme.

For information about the details you must enter to define the scheme on the Scheme tab, click here.