Every Dutch employer must arrange occupational health support, and since the Working Conditions Act was amended the form that support takes is prescribed. The employer must have a written basic contract with an occupational health service or a company doctor, setting out as a minimum how the statutory tasks will be performed.
What the basic contract must cover
The contract must provide for free access for employees to consult the company doctor, for the company doctor’s free access to the workplace, for a procedure for a second opinion by another company doctor, for how the company doctor handles complaints, and for the company doctor’s duty to report occupational diseases. It must also record how the occupational health service supports sickness absence guidance and the periodic occupational health examination.
An employer without such a contract is in breach of the Act, and the labour inspectorate can impose a penalty for it. In practice the absence tends to surface at the worst moment: during a dispute about reintegration, when the employer has to show what support was in place.
Open consultation with the company doctor
Employees may consult the company doctor about their health in relation to their work without asking the employer for permission and without being ill. The employer must make that consultation possible and must not be told who used it or why.
The purpose is prevention: an employee who can raise a developing problem early is less likely to end up on long-term sick leave. For employers, an open consultation that is genuinely accessible – publicised, easy to book, and not routed through a manager – is one of the cheapest measures available against absence.
The second opinion
An employee who doubts the company doctor’s assessment can request a second opinion from a different company doctor, at the employer’s expense. The company doctor must in principle honour that request, and the second opinion goes to the employee, who decides whether to share it.
The second opinion is not the same as an expert opinion from the UWV. That is the route to a binding assessment when employer and employee disagree about fitness for work or about reintegration efforts, and it is what a court will expect to see before ruling on such a dispute.
Privacy in absence guidance
The division of information is strict. The company doctor knows the diagnosis; the employer does not. What the employer may be told is the limitations and possibilities for work, the expected duration and whether the absence falls under a safety-net provision. Recording the nature of an illness in a personnel file is unlawful even where the employee mentioned it voluntarily.
The prevention officer
Alongside the occupational health service, every employer must appoint at least one prevention officer from among its own staff, whose role is to advise on and assist with health and safety measures and to work with the occupational health service. In organisations with up to twenty-five employees the employer may fulfil that role personally.
Advice
We review basic contracts and absence procedures, and advise employers and employees where a dispute about reintegration or a medical assessment arises. Please contact Law & More.
