I recently fell foul and into a Kafkaesque nightmare: we have an employee who in the last 3 years has been off for 2, but in intermittent bouts, but for the last year she has been off for the full 12 months and now the person is in the final stages of being assessed to go on the permanent sick and be looked after by the state.
Every 6 weeks she would be assessed by the work's doctor and we would receive a report saying they were unfit for active duty, work and travel. So I parked the person and waited for the doctor to give the all clear that they were well again. Big mistake, I should have been having weekly minuted telephone calls and every six weeks our own face-to-face meeting again documented with them to discuss their recovery. This is despite them being unfit to travel. To top it all, under legislation here, we as the employer are not allowed to know what ails them as it is confidential and cannot ask this in the meetings. We also get dossiers with pie charts, bar charts, plot graphs and detailed notes on the recovery process, but again what the doctor has diagnosed is excluded.
Because I hadn't been having these regular meetings, one of the facilitators in the process, put the knife in and tried to take the position that I hadn't participated in the recovery process sufficiently enough as the employer and the insurance payments were at risk and also they could claim back money paid.
An utter nightmare, had to get the lawyers involved and everything.