Free template
Most family leave templates are written for an office, where the pregnancy risk assessment is about display screens and a chair. In a veterinary practice it is about anaesthetic gases, radiography, zoonoses, lifting and large animal handling, and it needs doing the week you are told rather than the month before the leave starts.
Editable Word document, free, emailed to you.
Anaesthetic gases and scavenging. Radiography and scatter. Cytotoxic medicines. Toxoplasmosis and chlamydophila. Manual handling. Large animal handling and the risk of a kick or a crush. Restraining a fractious animal. Long shifts, night work and lone visits.
Where a risk cannot be removed by adjusting the work, the legal steps run in a specific order: change the conditions or hours, then offer suitable alternative work on no less favourable terms, and if neither is possible, suspend on full pay. Sending somebody home unpaid is not one of the options, and it is what practices sometimes do by accident.
6 April 2026. Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day one rights. Any qualifying service wording still sitting in your contracts, handbook or family leave policy is now wrong.
6 April 2024. Redundancy protection widened considerably. An employee who is pregnant has priority for any suitable alternative vacancy from the day they tell you, continuing for eighteen months from the child’s date of birth where maternity leave was taken. If a restructure is even being contemplated, work out who is covered first.
Family leave is one of the very few staffing events you get six months’ notice of, and practices still arrange cover three weeks before. Start at notification, agree the return arrangements before the leave begins, and put the return date on the rota as soon as you have it.
Then treat the return as the beginning rather than the end. The highest risk period for losing somebody is the three months after they come back. Book a check in at four weeks and another at twelve, and expect the honest conversation at the second.
Read it with our guides to maternity leave and flexible working requests, which is where most return to work conversations end up.
Free, by email
A notification form, acknowledgement letter, a pregnancy risk assessment built for anaesthetic gases and large animal handling rather than an office, a keeping in touch record and a return to work plan.
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