🔄 Return to work after depression
In brief
After a longer period of incapacity for work you do not have to return to full duty overnight. Gradual reintegration ("Hamburg model") increases working hours step by step according to a medical plan, while you continue to count as unfit for work. Independently of this, from six weeks of incapacity for work your employer must offer you workplace integration management (BEM).
Step by step
- Have a medical reintegration plan drawn upYour treating doctor sets out a stepped plan together with you (e.g. initially a few hours a day, gradually increasing).
- Obtain approval from employer and payerThe employer and the responsible payer (health insurance fund if you receive sickness benefit, pension insurance for rehabilitation aftercare) must approve the plan.
- Check the BEM offerAfter more than six weeks of incapacity for work (uninterrupted or repeated) within twelve months, the employer must offer BEM – participation is voluntary.
- Take part in the BEM meeting (or decline)In BEM, ways are discussed together of how incapacity for work can be overcome and future absences prevented – declining must not result in any disadvantage.
- Complete reintegration and follow upAt the end of gradual reintegration there is usually a full return to work; if needed, adjustments to the workplace can be pursued further through BEM.
Deadlines
- During gradual reintegration you continue to count as unfit for work – during this time you generally continue to receive sickness benefit or transition allowance (Übergangsgeld), not full regular pay.
- Participation in BEM is voluntary; under employment law a refusal must not be used against you.
- A BEM offer is not an automatic bar to dismissal – but it is meant to help avoid dismissals due to illness-related absences, and courts frequently examine it in unfair dismissal proceedings.
- Without the employer's consent to the specific schedule, gradual reintegration practically does not come about – clarify this early.
In depth · legal basis, figures and practice – for advisers and professionals
Gradual reintegration (Hamburg model)
The legal basis, depending on the payer, is § 74 SGB V (while receiving sickness benefit) or § 44 SGB IX (following medical rehabilitation, transition allowance). The doctor draws up an individual plan with increasing daily working hours; the person concerned remains registered as unfit for work throughout the measure. Employer and payer must consent; no regular employment relationship with a full entitlement to pay for the reduced working hours arises.
Workplace integration management (§ 167 para. 2 SGB IX)
If employees are unfit for work for more than six weeks within a year, uninterrupted or repeatedly, the employer must clarify, with the consent and involvement of the person concerned, how incapacity for work can be overcome, and with which benefits or aids renewed incapacity for work can be prevented and the job retained. The six weeks correspond to 42 calendar days; all absences due to illness are added together. BEM applies to all employees, not only to people with severe disability.
Relation to protection against dismissal
An omitted or inadequate BEM offer by the employer does not automatically make a later dismissal due to illness invalid, but is regularly taken into account by labour courts in the proportionality test.
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