Vocational rehabilitation is an ongoing issue that directly or indirectly affects everyone at a workplace. In recent years, laws and rules have changed. The 1st July 2008 changes were made in the General Insurance Act (SFS 1962:381). These changes have meant that there is now a so-called rehabilitation chain.  The rehabilitation chain contains time frames for when sick people will have their ability to work tested against their normal work or to other jobs. If a person is considered having enough capacity to be able to work he or she will lose their entitlement to sick pay.

The aim of our study is to investigate managers’ perceptions of the new rehabilitation chain, with a focus on vocational rehabilitation of long-term sick to get them back to work.

The method used was qualitative and data collection was done through nine semi-structured interviews. The results showed that the managers we interviewed believe that their primary responsibility in the rehabilitation work is to be the link between sick leave and workplace. The managers generally think that the introduction of the rehabilitation chain is a good thing. It has become clearer with what to do when an employee becomes ill and the timeframes provides a degree of security as the managers know when different things will happen. Our results also show that managers believe that cooperation with external actors such as social insurance has become easier since the rehabilitation chain was introduced. Some believe that the timeframes may be too tight and they are worried that the individual is forgotten in the process. The conclusion of our study was that there has been a need for a more active and transparent process of rehabilitation and this need has been met by the rehabilitation chain. Although the managers think that the rehabilitation work has become clearer, there is some disagreement in the way of working with sick leave. Some managers say for example that they are still doing so-called rehabilitation investigations, although it shifted responsibility from themselves to the Social Insurance Agency.