Sick leave can be expensive for an employer in the Netherlands. The employer has the obligation to pay at least 70% of the salary (up to a maximum) for 104 weeks of sickness. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that you have a sound policy on preventing and managing sick leave.

Once an employee is sick, you are obliged to register them sick with your occupational health & safety service provider within 7 days. Furthermore, you are responsible for taking an active role in your employee’s re-integration which includes documenting the steps taken at certain times along the way. The first of these obligations is that your employee should be seen by a company doctor within 6 weeks of registering ill. The company doctor then issues a problem analysis which you need to use in order to make a plan of action with your employee.  This then needs to be reviewed every time something changes in the advice of the company doctor or if the agreements cannot be adhered to. You also need to appoint a case manager to manage the sickness file.

If your employee stays sick for 104 weeks and claims a long term disability benefit from the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV), the employer has to submit this file to the UWV in order to prove that it has done everything it could to get the employee back to work. If the employer is found to have been negligent or to not have fulfilled the documentation obligations (on time), the UWV can order that the employer continues the salary payment for a third year.

In order to get the employee back to work as soon as possible and to avoid sanctions from the UWV, we can act on your behalf as case manager. We have extensive experience in managing sick leave cases and know how to navigate the system to get the best result for you.

The company doctor is a trained medical doctor and is specialized in the link between employee’s medical condition and their work. The company doctor does not replace the employee’s own family doctor or GP. The company doctor is bound by medical secrecy so can ask the employee about his medical condition (the employer may not do this) and will then decide if an employee is incapacitated for work in the light of that. The company doctor will always look at what the employee CAN do and not just at what they cannot do.

The company doctor does not only have contact with sick employees. Those who are (still) healthy should have free access to the company doctor as well. In this capacity, the company doctor has a preventative role whereby they can be consulted by the employees, before they get ill, with the aim of preventing sick leave.

Unfortunately, there is not a one-size fits all answer to this question. This will depend on many different factors and the DNA of your company. However, there are some elements that all employers have to comply with (see below).

• Set-up and maintain a “Documentation Register” in which all your processes concerning personal data are detailed.
• Communicate your Data Protection Policy to your employees, informing them of what you use their personal data for, with whom you share it and how they can exercise their rights under the GDPR.
• Determine how long you will keep all the personal data that is made available to you and implement processes to ensure that the data is actually deleted on time.
• Create an internal data breach procedure and set-up a way of registering all data leaks internally.
• Implement organizational and technical measures to reduce risks to loss, misuse or unauthorized access to personal data.
• Conclude Data Processing Agreements with processors that you share personal data with (or who just have access to it since you use their system)
• Consider whether you share personal data outside of the European Economic Area (even if it is part of the same concern) and document the legal ground for this. Ensure that you have an extra safeguard in place to protect this transfer of data.

We can advise you on GDPR topics relating to employment and can provide you with template documents for (most of) the above on request.