Occupational health (OH) services and advice can help reduce workplace illness, improve workforce wellbeing and ensure that businesses don’t discriminate against sick employees. Despite these advantages, only 28% of UK employers are currently providing occupational health services to their employees.
Work related illness remains a huge, and growing, issue for businesses, accounting for hundreds of millions of working days lost every year. To help address this, the government held a ‘Working Better’ consultation in 2023 to focus on the role of employers, OH providers and the government in increasing the overall provision of OH services. The consultation aimed to get a better understanding of what was required to prevent job losses due to ill health, reduce workplace illness and increase workplace productivity.
Following the end of the consultation, a taskforce was launched to set minimum levels of occupational health intervention that employers can adopt to improve employee health and wellbeing. The taskforce will raise awareness amongst employees of the benefits of occupational health services, empower employers to take proactive steps and help remove some of the financial barriers for SMEs trying to access these services.
In addition to the taskforce, a voluntary and free framework for businesses is expected to be published in the summer of 2024 and will include different levels of recommended OH intervention depending on the size of the company and its workforce.
The consultation also resulted in the government confirming it would consider the development of voluntary national workplace health and disability standards and an SME group purchasing framework to enable small and medium sized businesses to pool their purchasing to make OH services more affordable.
With these initiatives all aiming to help keep people in work, to, in turn, boost the economy, what are the wider implications on businesses?
The business impact
As with any new framework or initiative, it is always going to take time to see results, but we should expect that, if there is going to be an impact, it should start to be noticeable over the coming months. In order to see whether there has been an impact on sickness levels businesses will need to ensure they are keeping sick policies up to date, accurately recording all sick leave and actively engaging with the OH framework to find providers in their area.
Many employers will only call on the services of an occupational health provider when an employee has been off sick for some time and are considering their options for a return to work. It might be more productive, however, for these employers to retain OH services on a monthly basis, ensuring that the support is always there when required. This may provide better value in the long term and indicate the organisation’s commitment to reduce workplace illness and improve employee wellbeing.
Using OH services ensures that occupational health medicals can be carried out without delay to evaluate an employee’s health in relation to their work environment and put together the strategies needed to enable them to safely return to work, and denote the phases in which this return will need to take place, following a period of long term sickness absence.
Heathrow Medical is a SEQOHS approved OH provider offering occupational health medicals to meet the requirements of a wide range of businesses. More information on the benefits of OH services and how to reduce workplace illness can be found on their website www.heathrowmedical.com.
