Colleagues are advised that a change to how line managers should record absence in HealthRoster will go live from this Monday 15th December.

The change to the process will make the ‘Secondary reason for absence’ field a mandatory one, meaning managers must add further context behind a primary reason for absence when recording it in our system. For managers and colleagues, this might mean more in-depth conversations about absence & more opportunities to signpost to support any relevant available.

The primary reason for introducing this change is to enable improved data collection, enabling us as a health and wellbeing team to respond to patterns and trends in a more targeted and supportive fashion over the medium to long-term.

A guide to recording secondary absence reasons is available for line managers, and includes a list of all secondary absence reasons, categorised by primary reasons, helping make it that little bit easier to accurately record reasons for absence.

Our people are asked to be aware that managers may accordingly need to ask for a little more detail about any sickness absence moving forward, helping them to select the most appropriate secondary reason for absence.