The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development is calling for employers and family doctors to work together to help the sick-note system run more efficiently. It follows research from insurance company Norwich Union showing that up to nine million of the 22 million annual requests to GPs for sickness certificates are suspicious.Ben Willmott, Employee Relations Adviser at the CIPD, said the institute’s own research showed that dealing with absence management was now one of the biggest priorities for employers. To be effective they had to ensure they had progressive people management policies in place. These would prevent staff feeling like they did not want to go to work.

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Directgov, the Government’s new online information service is to be extended and is also to be made available to homes with access to digital television. Customer research has shown widespread support for the system, which is designed to improve the way that government information can be accessed electronically. Users are now able to visit Directgov by going to www.direct.gov.uk.As part of the next stage in the system’s roll out, the Office of the e-Envoy has announced that Directgov will be extended to digital television users through Sky, and Telewest and shortly through NTL. That will make it available to nearly 10 million households.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an integral part of the government’s modernising agenda and a crucial component for delivering better customer service standards and joined-up services. The CRM Academy website is the main portal for disseminating the outputs of the National CRM Programme. It contains support, advice, guidelines and toolkits to help local authorities and other public sector organisations with the CRM implementation. It has information for business and customer service managers and for IT specialist and e-government champions. The Academy has 41 products and tools developed by the National CRM Programme, to help plan and manage a CRM project. They provide everything from guidance on choosing what technical and integration systems to consider, to advice on persuading elected Members and senior officers to invest in CRM. In addition, the site is becoming the primary place where other government departments and organisations come to clarify the role of CRM.The CRM Academy site is at: http://www.crmnp.org/7D2F7R3SuAtq4vIb7m4ezHk86xb2AX8q/login.html

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