Vanderbilt Faculty & Staff Health and Wellness

As a manager, part of your job is having difficult conversations with employees, customers and your manager. Few people enjoy having these difficult conversations. Feedback is a gift. It helps the individual know what is expected and how they are performing according to those guidelines.

It is not uncommon for healthcare or emergency workers to request some type of critical incident stress management services following an acute incident which they label as being particularly stressful for them. The good news is that such professionals are usually very resilient.

In our business, we work with people who are sick, hurt and often scared. Because of this, people may become upset with us. Usually problems encountered are not the result of intentional actions we take. They are often the result of communication deficits, system problems, or red tape encountered which the customer is not equipped to handle. Here are some helpful tips when dealing with an upset person at work:

If you think the employee has one of the following conditions, ask the employee to wear a surgical face mask and report to Occupational Health as soon as possible.
 
 Chicken Pox
 Whooping Cough (Pertussis)
 Measles
 Tuberculosis
 Pink Eye (mask not needed)
 It is recommended that people not be in the workplace when they have a fever and respiratory symptoms. You should let your employees know this recommendation and encourage them to use sick time when appropriate.

Obtain Rights to Access Compliance Reports
 
 The Occupational Health Clinic provides compliance reports for multiple programs. To view compliance reports for your department area(s), you must complete a 2 step process.

If your employee is out more than 3 consecutive days, or plans to be out that long, notify the employee that the condition might qualify for FMLA. The FMLA request and approval process includes medical certification in which the treating provider provides appropriate documentation to HR of the individual's severity of illness. Other than FMLA documentation, please do not request doctor's notes for sick time use. A doctor's note is not required for an employee to use sick time and will not change whether the absence counts as an occurrence.

Occupational Health offers many programs and resources for employees to have the opportunity to complete their annual and new hire TB skin test requirements, including departmental TB Designees and an online submission survey to submit TB reads. Corrected spelling of opportunities.

When an employee reports an injury to you, first ask if medical attention is needed.