A CONTROVERSIAL scheme aimed at cutting sickness absence among council staff will come back under the spotlight tomorrow.

The project, which involves employees at City of York Council having to contact a nurse working for an outside agency rather than their manager when they report in sick, hit the national headlines when it was introduced in autumn last year.

Now councillors will be faced with a range of options, including scrapping the pilot scheme altogether, when they meet to discuss it tomorrow.

A report from the council's human resources services manager, Stephen Forrest, will recommend that councillors allow the scheme to continue until the end of this year, as part of an overall effort to reduce sickness absence within the council.

Since September last year workers in the council's Adult Services department have had to report absence due to sickness to nurses working for Active Health Partners.

A report from Mr Forrest to tomorrow's personnel committee meeting said the move came in response to "extremely high sickness absence levels" in Adult Services, which in 2003-04 "equated to 28 days per FTE (full-time employee), compared with a social services average in unitary authorities of 15.9 days per FTE".

He said: "Any reduction in sickness levels in Adult Services would have a significant impact on levels across the council as a whole which, at 12.2 days in 2003-04, places the council in the bottom quartile of unitary authorities."

Mr Forrest said a series of figures for the five months to February this year showed that the scheme had been a success compared with the same period in 2003-04, with a 27.1 per cent reduction in the frequency of absence.

A survey of employees in Adult Services produced "mixed results", he said, with 11 people saying the need to call Active Health Partners "hastened their return to work", though a majority found the questioning by its nurses "intrusive".

The public service UNISON has submitted comments to the committee, saying it did not believe there had been any significant or permanent improvement to levels of sickness absence. The union said the pilot scheme should be stopped immediately, and resources concentrated "in-house" on finding "hot spots" and "seeking to resolve the cause of the sickness absence".

But Mr Forrest said continuing the scheme would allow Active Health Partners to further improve its service, work more closely with council managers and provide a regular detailed analysis of absence statistics.

Updated: 10:21 Monday, April 18, 2005