As an advisor on Practice Index’s HR Help service, I see a lot of questions that relate to disability in the workplace. These include how Practice Managers can best support disabled employees, and how to manage tricky situations involving absence or performance. In this blog, I’m going to quickly run through the most important aspects of disability discrimination law, and how these requirements might be interpreted within the real-life context of GP workplaces.

Disabled employees have had legal protections for a long time. Back in 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act was launched. That was later repealed and replaced by 2010’s Equality Act, but most of the provisions remained the same. Both Acts have defined disability as a long-term physical or mental impairment that has a significant impact on an individual’s ability to carry out day-to-day activities. This can include anyone from wheelchair users and deaf people to those living with long-term conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and ADHD. Likewise, if an employee has any other health condition, such as anxiety, which has lasted for 12 months or more, then they are likely to meet criteria to be classed as disabled.

What protections do disabled workers have? For a start, any direct discrimination at work (such as, say, refusing to employ or promote someone purely because they have a long standing injury) would be unlawful. I imagine you know that already!

You may also be aware that disabled workers have protections against indirect discrimination (e.g., having a rule or process that puts disabled people at a disadvantage) and discrimination arising from disability (experiencing a detriment at work because of something related to your disability) – though both of these can be justified by an employer as proportionate in some circumstances.

There’s also a positive duty on employers to make reasonable adjustments to support and assist workers with disabilities, which is probably THE most relevant thing for Practice Managers to be aware of. Whilst there’s no need for employers to make adjustments that would be ‘unreasonable’ (such as allowing a disabled worker to remain absent from work forever on full pay!), case law from tribunals and higher courts has repeatedly shown that the definition of what they do consider ‘reasonable’ is wide-ranging. Here are some examples of reasonable adjustments that you might encounter or implement in the workplace:

• A job candidate discloses prior to interview that they’re dyslexic. As a written test is planned as part of the assessment, the Practice Manager liaises with the candidate about their specific needs. They agree for the candidate to have five minutes’ extra time for the test, and to be able to use a laptop with spellchecker enabled. If the candidate is successful at interview, similar adjustments will be agreed for their time at work.
• An employee returns to work following significant sight loss. The Practice Manager engages with them, and with Access to Work and the RNIB, in order to identify and source suitable technology for them to use (such as voice-to-text apps), and adapts their job description to remove activities that would probably now be unsafe. The employee takes on equivalent but safer duties to replace these.
• Long-term anxiety leads an employee to be absent from work on several separate occasions. The Practice Manager seeks Occupational Health’s advice about ways to support the employee’s mental and emotional wellbeing in the workplace, and makes an individual adjustment to the practice’s Sickness Absence Policy to allow them a higher trigger level than others before formal sanctions are considered. If this higher trigger level is breached, the Practice Manager will engage formal absence management procedures (which could result in warnings, or eventually dismissal), whilst continuing throughout to seek other ways of supporting the employee.
• Following a serious error of judgement at work, an autistic employee is investigated for potential gross misconduct, and a disciplinary hearing follows. At the hearing, the employee (who has admitted the error and reflected on it) explains how they’d misunderstood the risks in this situation, and this misunderstanding was connected to their autism. The Practice Manager decides that with further training, it’s unlikely that the misconduct will be repeated. They issue a final written warning on this occasion, rather than dismiss the employee.

What do all of these examples have in common? They all illustrate Practice Managers adapting procedures, routines, or work arrangements to meet the needs of their disabled staff members. These adjustments have been chosen because they’re potentially effective, manageable, and above all, reasonable!

If you’re trying to find ways of managing and supporting a disabled worker, check out Practice Index’s resources for PLUS members, which includes a Staff Reasonable Adjustments Agreement [PLUS] and regular HR Updates [PLUS] covering many topics including disability. There are also HR Masterclass modules on various subjects including both performance and absence management, which all include sections about disability and reasonable adjustments.

Susi O’Brien