Consent for Occupational Health Reports

Dr Lara Shemtob
Nov 4
4 min read

Updated: Nov 13

You’ve had an occupational health consultation. Now what?

Occupational health consultations take place in confidence. That means that your manager or your employer cannot interrogate your occupational health record. Nor can they ask the occupational health clinician who saw you for information on the consultation, without your consent.

In practice, confidentiality can be important when it comes to health and work, for a number of reasons, including that health can be personal, and many people prefer to keep this information separate from their colleagues.

What happens during an occupational health consultation?

A consultation with OH consists of three parts that are familiar in all healthcare settings :

Data gathering - finding out about what is going on with your work and your health
Analysis - putting this information into context
Shared decision making - making a plan together with you about what to do to improve things. This may include agreeing recommendations for health as well as work.

Why workplace context matters

In occupational health, the workplace context is often relevant to the plan. Some examples

Recommendation of a phased return after sickness absence due to surgery
Recommendation of increased supervision for someone who has experienced a lack of support contributing to work related stress
Recommendation of no night work for someone that has epileptic seizures at night

In order to execute on these plans, the workplace needs to be aware of them. In many cases, it is impossible to implement an occupational health plan without cooperation from the workplace. And in order to cooperate, the workplace needs to know the plan.

Agreeing what to share with your workplace

Part of the shared decision making process in an occupational health consultation will include agreeing on what to communicate to the workplace. The minimum that is useful to communicate are the occupational health recommendations. Sometimes it can be relevant to include some health information for context. The way information is shared between occupational health and employers is via a written report.

What is an OH report?

An occupational health report is a summary of your occupational health consultation. It is sent to the relevant person at your workplace, often the person who referred you who would usually be your line manager, with your consent. It may also be shared with HR, if you consent to this. If you are not sure who the report will be sent to, ask your occupational health clinician who will clarify this before the report is sent.

Reviewing your report before it’s shared

Your OH clinician will discuss what will go in the report with you before writing it, giving you the opportunity to request that any sensitive items are excluded. The OH clinician will also offer to send you the report before it goes to your employer, again giving you an opportunity to exclude any sensitive information or point out any corrections of fact.

Importantly, the OH clinician’s recommendations - which you will have discussed in the consultation, cannot be edited. This is often the most important part of the report to share because it helps communicate the plan to the workplace.

Withholding a report

If you want to withhold the report altogether, you are able to since the consultation was confidential. There are only a few situations- usually involving concern around risk to others- in which the clinician may need to consider a confidentiality breach. Where this is the case, they will limit information sharing as much as possible and inform you of the breach as long as this does not increase harm.

Why sharing the report matters

An occupational health report where recommendations are not shared with the treating team is usually a missed opportunity. The whole purpose of occupational health is to help join the dots between work and health. Where there is no communication between the employees and employers about what took place in an OH consult there is a missed opportunity to join the dots - which means a missed opportunity to benefit both work and health. Without knowing about your occupational health, your manager or HR team may make a decision about your work and working conditions without the benefit of medical advice.

If you decline to share an occupational health report, your occupational health clinician may contact you again to understand why. Sometimes, alternatives, such as a joint meeting between an individual, their manager and occupational health could be suggested if this is more acceptable to the individual.

Key points to takeaway

So, in summary here are the key points to takeaway around occupational health reports:

Occupational health consultations are confidential
The occupational health clinician will write a report aimed at communicating relevant recommendations to the workplace
The occupational health clinician will discuss an outline of the report with you prior to writing it, including asking you about any information you would like to exclude
You will have the opportunity to review the report prior to the report being sent to the employer
The occupational health clinician’s recommendations as agreed in the consultation cannot be edited, but it may be possible to make some corrections of fact or exclude some sensitive information