A friend of mine unfortunately had a car accident in the recent bad weather and has been signed off sick by his GP till the end of the month. His emploters are going through a rough patch and have decided to lay off 4 engineers, one of my friends colleagues went to management and told them my friend had not been in an accident and just wanted a few weeks off? he obviously felt he was going to lose his job and tried to get my friend laid off instead. My friends employer phoned him yesterday and has said they want him to attend an occupational health appointment tomorrow, probably to see if he is telling the truth. My Question is, can his employer make him attend this appointment even though he is signed off by his GP?

Alan I understand why you feel that way, but can assure you it is genuine, my friend will probably attend the referral tomorrow. The reason i am asking is that i work for a large organisation and we never send our staff to referrals until they return to work, i think it is really unusual for them to ask him to go, and wondered whether it was actually legal to do so, as his GP has signed him off. Personnally i dont feel that they can ask him to attend the referral until he returns to work. Any advice would be appreciated. Sean

Sean, I would say that the majority of the OH referalls that we do are when someone is already off sick. But you could also just go back to the GP for further information. We have recently found that this is often cheaper and gets better 'results'