With GP’s no longer bulk billing and long waits. Where is everyone getting their medical certificates for a cold?
My pharmacy charges $30.
OzBargains Best Medical Certificates
Comments
Does your workplace accept statutory declarations?
They are an acceptable form of evidence according to Fair Work, although this isn't mandated [emphasis mine]:
Types of evidence needed for sick / carer’s leave1
Medical certificates or statutory declarations are examples of acceptable forms of evidence. While there are no strict rules on what type of evidence needs to be given, the evidence has to convince a reasonable person that the employee was genuinely entitled to the sick or carer’s leave.
It’s a bank, I wonder if they would accept them.
Probably just depends on your manager.
If you don't take many sick days they probably don't check them.
It’s a bank, I wonder if they would accept them.
Maybe ask them…..
Pretty sure you can go to a police station and get a certificate for not being able to attend work, and don't have to pay any fee.
Glad I've never been asked for a med cert for anything less than a week.
Legally companies can ask, but all I have worked for only require it if it is 2 or more days and then it depends on you past history of sickies.
Yeh.. ive been through the banks and they've got policies (usually 2 days or more, like you've mentioned) but it's really up to your boss.
I wish i have a family member work as gp
Even better if they are an authorised prescriber!
Welcome to OzBargain. As soon as we've sorted the repairable written off car issue, we'll get right onto medical certificates from our resident ChatGPT.
Gotta take a sickie to check the car out ya know?
Whoever you work for, either don't care or if they do need it they know they can't check if it's real anyway.
That's not true. An employer has the right to contact a medical practice, pharmacy or whoever has issued the medical certificate to check it's authenticity with or without your consent. They don't have the right to further enquire about your medical condition.
And you think they're going to tell someone over the phone, who is claiming to be an employer, whether a patient of theirs was at their clinic or not the day before?
Or you're going to scan the doc, email it and hope they respond with an answer verifying or denying it's real.
Yeah I'm sure clinics must get this every day.And you think they're going to tell someone over the phone, who is claiming to be an employer, whether a patient of theirs was at their clinic or not the day before?
No they can't ask that. They can send the practice a copy of the medical certificate and verify if it's real or not.
It happens all the time everywhere in my experience. Obviously there would be circumstances where an employer is more likely to check. I.e. blatant mistakes in the certificate or repeatedly having a lot of leave.
@Clear: Yep, happened to me before. Employer phoned me asking to verify the authenticity of a certificate I apparently issued, I told them it's fake. No discussion about the medical condition or why it was issued. Perfectly reasonable request and doesn't break any patient confidentiality. The employer was not happy at all. It's probably a form of fraud as well and the employee probably broke some laws by forging a medical certificate. If I had nothing better to do I might have actually followed it up with the authorities but didn't want to waste their time or mine.
@Blargman2001: Happened at a workplace long time ago and the employee was fired on the spot. It is a fraud and no sensible business would tolerate that sort of behaviour.
@Maxxjet: Yep, it's literal unemployed behaviour & can't ever be tolerated.
Imagine in this day and age even being stupid enough to think about faking a medical certificate, when all it takes to verify it's authenticity is a 30 second e-mail to the Practice/Chemist it came from.
This is very bad advice. Falsifying medical certificates is definitely fraud.
Seen this happen. Guy got fired because HR checked them.
Spelling issues and font differences caught him out.Would’ve been better not giving any, it wasn’t even paid leave.
That's fraud and forgery, brotha!
Easy way to cop an Uttering charge.
Never forge one because it's easy to tell, then you're in alot of shit.
I had a friend go to the GP more than a decade ago though because he had the illness of "missed exam due to daylight saving" or something like that. He said stomach bug obviously. That's different though because it came legitimately from a GP.
Saved his arse the GP.
Exactly; doctors are almost always happy to help.
There have been a few times where I've been honest and said "I just need a day for my mental health", and they write me up.
Then there's always "I have diarrhoea"; automatic 24-48 hours after the last 'bowel movement'.Nowadays you can just provide a digital stat dec so it's legit and free. It can obviously still be abused, but it cuts out the middleman.
The only thing you probably got right is that they don’t care.
You can get a statutory declaration through mygov.
https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-identity/digital-com…
According to this ABC article: 'According to the Fair Work Ombudsman, a statutory declaration is an example of "an acceptable form of evidence" for medical leave.'
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-28/options-medical-certi…
Here's the Fairwork article:
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/sick-and-carers-leave/paid…
Great tip, uses Digital ID so no witness verification needed.
Thank you
According to the Fair Work Ombudsman
Fair Work Ombudsman doesn't apply to everyone…
Doesn't it?
No
JV is correct, it doesn't.
Posted yesterday, great timing thank you.
InstantScripts for $19 or a tiny bit less as a OnePass member. Can be done from home over the phone.
Doesn't beat the Stat Dec for cost saving, but if you're pushed for a Medical Certificate it is an option.
How much of a discount do ONEPASS memberships get? Thank you
95 cents
How about this one:
https://drjimmy.com.au/medical-certificate-onlineOnly $11 for 1 day or $16 for 2 days.
Seems like the cheapest thank you
Reminds me of this - Dr Nick - B is for Bargain
@Jimothy Wongingtons (permission please to make a Simpsons reference)
✅
Hang on. Are you moonlighting as Dr Jimmy?
Dr Jimmy has a fair bit in common with Dr Nick when it comes to being dodgy. He has restrictions placed upon him by AHPRA due to sexual misconduct with a vulnerable patient. No wonder he's doing a telehealth service when most practices wouldn't want him.
He must go through 70+ patients a day just doing sick certificates. How mind numbing.
@MS Paint: Especially since he's not doing it through Medicare. <6 minutes would earn him $18.95 and 6-20 minutes $41.40 (depending on item numbers). Stack that with the $11 and it's a decent profit for a small amount of work.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VCAT…
It's strange nothing comes up about this when googling. Had to actually look it up on AHPRA.
@Outrageous: Not strange at all. The media pick up like 1% of cases. There's heaps of doctors with restrictions places on them and a lot of these telehealth online only ones have them.
My doctor still bulk bills but I haven't needed to provide a medical certificate whenever I have been sick as I don't get sick often.
Some GPs still bulk bill. But for a short illness no medical certificate required for me. Some employers will also accept a stat dec.
Not that I've ever been hounded by an employer for a medical cert, but how the hell does someone get a medical cert if they're too sick to leave the house or can't get an appointment with their GP in time?
Any employer that won't accept a stat dec isn't worth working for, in my opinion.
Agreed. If you're pulling frequent sickies, then fair enough. You probably should be seeing a doctor and it's reasonable for your employer to have some sort of documentation as to why your capacity is reduced.
But if I'm going weeks or months between sick days and still having to provide a cert for 1-2 days off, then that tells me that I'm not trusted and I'm probably not in a healthy working situation. Especially because trying to get a cert is often pointless, adds load to the healthcare system, exposes others to illness, is effectively a mandatory expense for using leave entitlements, and just adds stress and exertion to a sick day (which is helping no one recover).
I have two doctors: one is for certificates - telehealth, can request a call back and the cert is emailed back to me. Don’t really care about quality but seems not too bad.
Another doc is really good, for something more complex than a simple cold. Don’t mind paying gap fees but my doc does not charge me extra, this is up to them whether they want to charge you or not actually. Just spend some time researching around.
Great so your main doctor has to do all the hard work but none of the simple stuff and he bulk bills you anyway.
Bad move and I'd hate it if you were my patient.
Get 1 medical certificate then use PDF editor to change the date. Do you know anyone who has had HR contact the doctor to confirm they went? If used sparingly this is a good way to save money and doctors/pharmasists time.
This year my company had our new HR do just that. 2 people were caught out forging doctor’s notes and subsequently fired.
Interesting, do know what the process is for this? Do doctors/medical centres release their attendance records over the phone to anyone that verbally identifies as being someone's employer?
No idea, no one was privy to any information. We only found out it was happening once the first person got done.
Good question though, I’m wondering that myself now…I don’t really consider attendance sensitive information but others might disagree.@SuperGreen: Now that I think about it, the attendance aspect is probably irrelevant, the employee has provided a certificate issued from that medical practice which they could easily email a copy over to get written confirmation back it's fraudulent, which would be critical evidence to gather in the case of employee dismissal. Whoever the certificate gets passed on to would have a right to confirm with the issuer it's not fraudulent. So yeah, most likely a non-issue.
You can now do through Mygovid linked to your mygov account a Legal Statutory Declaration and you sign it youself.
I live in a small town i no longer have to hunt around for someone to sign the statutory declaration.
Plenty of bulk billing clinics where i live. Just get one and use ms paint to change the dates every now and then.
I don't need them, I'm the boss.
But seriously, we don't request them of our staff.
What's the point? They're entitled to sick leave if they get sick and I want them to rest, not chase some piece of paper for no reason.
Guess what, my staff rarely ever have sick days.
I've never understood bosses who micromanage sick leave, if they're sleep deprived from a new puppy or woke up hungover from a heavy night then I'd rather they just rest up rather than make mistakes.
Unless the employee has a negative leave balance, then they're legally entitled to do whatever they like with that time.
Costs you nothing, but buys you a ton of good will.
Can confirm. I have a great team of happy, loyal, hard working, productive staff as a result.
You have to give a little to take a little.
but do you make sure they put into system for the sick leave they took?
Guessing it matters more for people who treat sick leave like impromptu annual leave. If someone takes them far more than someone would consider normal, it'd be grounds for a quick follow-up with the clinic.
They're entitled to the leave but if they abuse it (nobody has), I'll manage them out.
To be honest, I've found people generally appreciate the trust and you get more productivity out of them.
I notice how much work they do outside work hours….. We don't ever ask them to work outside hours.
Average absenteeism in Australia is somewhere over 8 days. Employees universally resent that sick leave accrues but doesn't get paid out on resignation. If your company genuinely achieves super-low absenteeism that's an astounding achievement. I would however put to you the possibility your staff is taking back time in other ways…
I can assure you that they don't (at least not to a perceptible level) and I don't expect my staff to work themselves to death.
If the work is done and we're meeting KPI, I don't care if they take some time for self care. I want happy, stable staff.
They are paid overs, provided lots personal and team bonuses, flexible work / life balance and generally treated like valued adults.
We are close with them all and they are loyal people (we have terminated people in the past who were taking advantage).
I put to you the possibility that they are just happy and do the right thing as a result.
Either way, we have had massive year on year growth (even during covid) and timelines are being met so we must be doing something right.
I just believe treating people like they are the reason you make money (since they are) and removing unnecessary things like "meetings about meetings" sees increased productiveness.
It's the way I wanted to be treated when I worked for people in my career and I only ever had something similar once.
Oh, our average staff absenteeism is 2 days annually. I never even looked at that. Amazing!!!
Congrats to you on your success. I only raise this counterpoint because I joined an SME where the CEO said all the same things. After finding my feet I reported the vibe among the employees didn't match the CEO's perception; so we did Gallup's Q12® Survey and found the company ranked somewhat below expectation. Credit to management though for sharing the results. The company's prime objective was to make money so if that continued they didn't really care about anything else.
@sumyungguy: Oh that's sad. What a pity.but I agree, good on them for sharing the results. Hopefully they'll address the issues.
How big of an SME in terms of staff?
@sumyungguy: Oh that's a lot more than we have.
We have 9 staff.
I'd imagine that, at 50 staff, it's impossible to be close to every staff member.
@imurgod: .. and the probability of employing persistent sickie takers increases accordingly. I've encountered many; it's hard-wired into their psyche and employers have to resort to defensive tactics, like medical certificates.
Of course.
instantscrips does dr note for 19 ive been using lately for single days if needed.
But I go to dr if more than 1 day
Do employers actually verify anything on the med cert beyond looking at the name of the practice, a random name, date and signature?
If not, then… you know..would depend on how much someone abuses the system
Are they 'medical certificates' from a pharmacy or an absence from work etc.
I thought only doctors could issue medical certificates.
Does your workplace accept statutory declarations?