Can someone please advise what the % absence required to trigger a referral to the HSE on stress. Does anyone out there include stress in their H&S annual audits. Thanks for your input I would be grateful for any advise of this.

Must be Friday..we advise anyone suffering with stress to contact HR, the health and safety department would support HR and the employer, but we do not include or offer advice on stress related issues in our health and safety capacity or audits.

Problem is GR is the main focus of contact with employees who are absent and in many circumstances the H&S element finds things out a lot further down the chain... not rght way to go but is so often the case!

Ella, little confused by the 'referral to HSE' bit. That said, first obstacle to getting stuck in with 'stress' is that it's very difficult to identify 'work-related'. Our Occ Health people tend to report on referrals to them under the umbrella of stress but it's not very meaningful for the reason just stated. On the pro-active side, we have an annual survey of staff which features a number of questions linked to the Management Standards. This tends to give us a feeling for what is and isn't working and something that is quanitifiable. Again it's scuppered by being subjective and it also doesn't guarantee that those answering know the difference between stress and pressure. Reading this back, it's not very helpful but there's my two pennarth.