I’m in Perth and drove past a pharmacy offering no appointment sick certificates for employees – on a billboard on the main road.
I thought it was a joke. It is not. Pharmacists can issue medical certificates for minor conditions. This pharmacy is promoting that service in a way that appears to encourage sickies.
I wish I had a photo to show you it. The billboard is bright, like they are selling the day off. It is also situated on a road you;d travel to a nice beach, very convenient.
Sick days are are right but they need to be respected. Make it too easy to get the day off and the right can be abused as employers can find with some employees magically using the exact number of days available just in time for the anniversary.
While don’t think we need to reduce the sick/personal leave allowance, there should not be promotion of an easy route to getting a medical certificate. Further, I’d be happy for pharmacists to not have the right to produce these.
I’m in two minds about this Mark. Where I live, it’s not easy to get into any of the local doctors on short notice, unless it’s a life threatening condition.Unless there’s a cancellation, you have somewhere between a week and a fortnight wait.Not good for people who are genuinely ill.
So, the use of appropriately trained allied health professionals, such as nurses in a pharmacy environment,has a valuable role to play, provided appropriate controls are in place, such as qualifications of those professionals issuing certificates,length of time off covered by those certificates and perhaps more importantly,to address your concern, no more than say 50% of a persons sick leave to be covered by such certificates.The other 50% to be provided by doctors, and consultations for these purposes not covered by medicare.I wouldn’t imagine it would be too difficult for medicare to set up a database to monitor and enforce based on use of a persons medicare card.
I think this would be a reasonable middle ground.