As high levels of long term illness “hold back our economy”, health leaders have called on UK employers to take a stronger, earlier role in preventing employee sickness.
This was the key message at a Labour Party Conference fringe debate organised by provider Simplyhealth.
“Long-term sickness absence is undeniably holding back both our health services and our economy,” said Richard Sloggett, CEO of policy research centre Future Health.
“Prevention has to move from merely being an aspiration and turned into a reality, and businesses have a central role to play.
“Over a quarter of businesses have told us they have seen an increase in sickness absence in the last 12 months, so enabling them to play a bigger role in the health of the UK workforce has the potential to improve outcomes and create a more resilient and productive nation.”
Fellow panellists at the event, titled ‘Workplace Health, National Wealth: Prioritising Prevention for a Healthier Economy’, included Lewis Atkinson MP, Theresa Bischof, head of campaigns and communications at The Good Growth Foundation, and Paul Schreier, CEO of Simplyhealth.
Atkinson, who chairs the Parliamentary Labour Party Departmental Group for Health and Social Care, said: “The government’s 10 Year Health Plan recognises the need for NHS services to better fit around people’s lives including their jobs, and the need to shift focus from treatment to prevention.
“Employers have a key role in enabling this [by] promoting good health in the workplace and adopting a supportive approach to help employees manage conditions while they stay at work. Good work is good for health, and a healthier workforce means a stronger economy.”
Simplyhealth’s Schreier stressed that current pressures on businesses have resulted in significant variation between workers who are offered workplace health benefits.
“[There are] still too many barriers to access for those who do have them. By formally bringing businesses into the fold, enabling them to collaborate with health providers and reducing burdensome taxes on workplace health provision, we can ensure employers have a clearer share in the responsibility of healthcare in the UK,” he said.
The panel agreed that tackling the root causes of sickness absence was “a national priority”.
Around 2.8 million working-age adults are out of work because of long term illness, costing the economy £150 billion a year, and increasing pressure on the NHS.
More than 200,000 people left jobs specifically for health reasons in 2023/24, while the Health and Wellbeing at Work report from the CIPD and Simplyhealth found that the average UK employee was off sick for almost two weeks in the last 12 months.
Further topics included the impact of mental ill health issues, often caused by high workloads and stress, and musculoskeletal pain, brought on by repetitive, prolonged tasks or lack of movement. Both these health issues were flagged in the report as the leading causes of long-term absence.
Employers are keen to improve workforce health as 73 percent said they feel a responsibility to do more to look after employee health, according to research conducted earlier this year by Simplyhealth.
However, the same research also showed that 53 percent of British workers who use workplace health benefits have faced barriers to accessing them. A sixth (16 percent) said they had to ask their line manager for approval beforehand, while one in ten (9 percent) said their pre-existing conditions were not included in the cover. Nearly a third (31 percent) of employers said they worry about the difficulty in finding health plans for employees that cover pre-existing conditions.
