Nurseries and Early Years Settings

Nurseries & Early Years Ocupational Health

Maximising Attendance & Wellbeing Through Healthy Work

Workplace Occupational Health Services

Nurseries & Early Years Services

COPE has considerable experience of providing occupational health services in the education sector - including Nurseries and Early Years settings. We use this experience to ensure that our customers receive professionally delivered services that meet their organisational and legal needs in all aspects of occupational health.

We count a number of Early Years providers amongst our longstanding clients. These vary from individual nurseries, those with a handful of settings, right up to very large organisations with a wide range of geographically dispersed settings.

Early Years provision presents a unique and challenging management environment - often with a predominantly younger employee profile, where frequent short term absence can be a significant drain on resources and morale.

We find that mental health and wellbeing concerns are a predominant cause for absence and poor performance amongst younger employees and musculoskeletal (joints and back pain) the largest concern for middle-aged employees. Our services incorporate a range of services specifically designed to support Early Years providers with these common challenges.

We also acknowledge that general life challenges can often be a major cause of unplanned absence for younger employees. We have a service specifically designed to help employees deal with every day life challenges. This service has a major impact on attendance, employee wellbeing and employee satisfaction.

Occupational Health Referrals

The principle objectives of COPE’s occupational health advisers when undertaking such consultations with an employee are to :
•   support the employee to understand and manage their health condition
•   provide advice to the referring party on the employee’s fitness to fulfil their role
•   provide appropriate rehabilitation or return to work plans
•   answer any questions specified by the referring party on the referral form
•   identify any potential work-related element to the employees health condition

Our online browser-based referral App is simple, secure and easy to use and we don't tie you into expensive long term contracts. All our qualified OH Professionals are trained and experienced in undertaking telephone consultations and example reports are available on request, to demontrate the clarity and quality of the advice provided following our consultations.

Fitness to Teach Health Assessments

COPE undertakes health assessments for new employees to so we can advise you if:
•   the new employee is fit for their proposed role
•   there is a pre-existing ill health condition which may impact on their ability to fulfil their role
•   there are any implications relating to the Equality Act
•   any baseline health surveillance may be required

Fitness to Teach assessment questionnaires are facilitated via a secure online app. The HR, or recruitment, team input the new employee's name, job role and email address onto a form on our online web portal. The employee will then receive an email containing a unique link to their questionnaire, which is accessed via a standard web browser.

Once completed, the system notifies our OH team and an experienced, qualified Occupational Health Adviser reviews the questionnaire and completes a Fitness to Work certificate. A secure "direct access" link to the fitness certificates is then emailed to a nominated individual (normally a member of the HR team, Administrator, or Business Manager, for the Schools records).

Mental Health, Wellbeing & Life Challenges Support Line for Employees

The aim of the this service is to tackle key issues that affect the employee's wellbeing and work performance. We do this by working with employees to help them identify and resolve personal and work related concerns.

Sometimes individual counselling is the answer - but, more of than not, the concern relates to a specific issue that represents a challenge for the individual. These challanges are often in the "homeplace" setting, but have a significant influence on performance or attendance in the workplace.

Common concerns are often matters such as relationship difficulties, financial worries, younger care difficulties, elder care difficulties, homeplace changes, managing drug or alcohol use and general health concerns (eg Covid).

The most common reason for contacting the service over the last year has been matters related to Covid; another common request has been support in managing/organising childcare or elder care services (this is a regular cause for concern and is the cause of around a third of short term unplanned absence nationally).

Key features of our service include:

Access to counsellors 24 hours a day, 365 days per week - via telephone, video and private social media channels
Rapid access to: Legal, Health & Wellbeing, Finance & Debt - staffed by professionally qualified specialists
Specific support relating to identifying reliable short and longer term child care and elder care services
eCounselling and eCBT for employees who don't feel able to engage with a counsellor
Up to 6 formal counselling appointments (either face-to-face, telephone or video) per employee per annum
Fantastic online resources and App, with masses of information, support and signposting

All help lines are answered by professionally qualified specialists:

The counselling help line being answered by fully qualified counsellors..

The legal help line is answered by qualified and experienced solicitors.

The Money & Debt help line is staffed by financial & debt management specialists.

The Health & Well-Being help line is answered by Occupational Health nurses.

Physiotherapy Assessment & Advice

Some work environments are a particularly high risk of causing physical symptoms associated with manual handling and postural loading. They can be incredibly difficult to manage from a H&S risk perspective and the risk of absence – particularly with older employees, or inexperienced younger employees – can be very high.

Nurseries and Early Years Settings can have a high impact on backs and joints as a result of constant bending and twisting to pick up or engage with young children.

Physiotherapists are specialists in assessing and treating musculoskeletal conditions. If some of your work areas have a relatively high rate of absence relating to musculoskeletal conditions (backs and joints), this may be a service option worth considering.

We are able to offer face to face or virtual (video) consultations via a our national network of physiotherapy clinics. The principle objectives of COPE’s occupational health physiotherapists when undertaking such consultations with an employee are to :

support the employee to understand and manage their health condition
provide advice to the referring party on the employee’s fitness to fulfil their role
provide appropriate rehabilitation or return to work plans
answer any questions specified by the referring party on the referral form

Following a physical assessment, a report is completed for the referring party. The information provided in our reports covers the all of the above, with a focus on effective rehabilitation and return to work if this is deemed to be achievable. This may include a return to work plan, or other adjustments to facilitate the employee’s being safe and productive at work. It will also include a summary of any advice provided to the individual relating to the management of their condition. Follow up treatments may also be recommended. If a safe return to work is not considered an option within the foreseeable future, this will be stated by the physiotherapist – enabling the organisation to make management decisions about the individuals future employment.