How do we handle sickness absence linked to a disability?

First, separate it from ordinary sickness

Handle disability-related absence separately: as a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act 2010, consider discounting it or raising your trigger points, assessing each case individually before any warning. Record the disability-related days apart from general sickness, so the two are never added together when a trigger or capability review is calculated. Acas sets out the practical options here, including recording such absence as a separate category, not counting some or all of it towards your trigger points, and increasing the number of absences that prompt a review Acas.

Then assess the case, do not apply a blanket rule

Discounting is not automatic or unlimited. The duty is to make a reasonable adjustment, so what is reasonable is judged case by case Equality Act 2010, s.20. Get input from Occupational Health on the likely pattern and duration of the absence, and on adjustments that would help the person stay in work. Then decide, and write down, which absence you are discounting and why. Adjusting the trigger point itself, or deciding that disability-related absence does not count towards it, is one of the clearest reasonable adjustments you can make, because a disabled employee taking time off for treatment could otherwise hit a review point far faster than a colleague Acas.

The risk: meeting your own policy is no defence

Here is the part the trigger-policy guidance usually misses. A warning, or a dismissal, that flows from disability-related absence is unfavourable treatment under the Act, even where your absence policy was met to the letter. That is “discrimination arising from disability”, and it stands unless you can show the action was a proportionate way to achieve a legitimate aim Equality Act 2010, s.15. It applies wherever you knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, of the disability. No formal diagnosis is needed for any of this to bite: what matters is whether the person meets the legal test for disability, a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long-term effect on day-to-day activities s.6. So if you push a disability-related absence towards a sanction without first adjusting the triggers and taking Occupational Health advice, you are exposed, however clean your paperwork looks. See what can follow if you fail to make reasonable adjustments.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.