Managing occupational health clinicians

Good management practice does to differ significantly when managing clinicians and non-clinicians. However a manager must be cognisant of the duties of clinicians towards their regulator both to assist the reports and to resist bogus challenges or objections. Clinicians are answerable to regulators and must be careful in the Occupational Health environment not to (for example) neglect patient consent in their day to day work. A good manager will be cognisant of this. This does not differ from any other aspect of an organisations day to day running: managers can not override Safety regulation for example. Occupational Health Clinicians are subject to the same probities giving advice about worker groups as when dealing with individual patients: Whilst there may be less onerous considerations surrounding patient consent in anonymised groups, potentially the harm done by poor clinical advice in this scenario can adversely affect the health of hundreds or thousands of workers. There are examples of this happening in areas such as hearing and doctors giving Industrial Hygiene advice which they are not competent to render and supervised neglect of workers in audiometric screening programs. Poor performance needs addressing as soon as is reasonably possible. The Occupational health manager should be clear about where standards have lapsed, what is expected and invite the employee to discuss their ideas for where their performance can be improved. In some circumstances it may be prudent to follow up such a meeting with an email to the employee summarising the meeting and next steps. However the OH manager should be sensitive to outside or inside-work factors an employee who normally performs well. Persistent poor clinical performance or issue threatening patient safety may need additionally addressing via another route and or the employees regulator. HR should always be consulted when appropriate.

NA