Employers don’t really need to worry about the health and well-being of their staff, visitors to the Occupational Health Theatre at Safety & Health Expo heard today (15 May) – unless they actually want people to work, that is!
A panel of eminent practitioners in the field took to the stage at the NEC to debate the current status of occupational-health provision in British workplaces and came to the conclusion that it is still extremely patchy, despite the ‘health and well-being’ agenda being heavily promoted in recent years.
The reasons for this are many, and include economic pressures – Prof Neil Budworth, of E.On pointed out that “soft” issues like health and well-being, training, etc. tend to be first for the chop when cuts have to be made, because they are a long-term investment; the perceived difficulty of dealing with health issues – technical director of occupational health for Santia Lisa Roberts used the example of obesity, which has quadrupled in recent years, and which has a real impact on work life; and recruitment problems in the profession itself – the EEF’s Prof Sayeed Khan claimed that occupational physicians are “a dying breed” and the nursing side is not faring much better.
Prof Khan also pointed out that the Government’s lack of a response to Dame Carol Black and David Frost’s review of the UK’s sickness-absence regime is sending the wrong signals in terms of the importance of the issue. “The latest we’ve heard is there won’t be a response issued until October – why should it take a whole year to act on this?” he wondered.
Discussing current trends, the panel agreed that absence management is a ‘hot topic’ but also, according to Lisa Roberts, remains “a bugbear – how to do it, and why? I don’t have the answer to that.” President of the British Occupational Hygiene Society Bob Rajan said the problem is that absence management “is looked at separately from absence causes, but it is the latter that we should be looking at”. Lisa Roberts agreed, saying: “The key is early intervention. Companies must go right back and start by reviewing their policies – only then can they start managing the problem.”
The impact – or lack of it – of the ‘fit note’ was also debated, with all of the panellists agreeing that it has been rather a damp squib. Prof Neil Budworth said this should be a real cause for concern. He explained: “On average, GPs only spend around seven minutes with each patient. The paperwork may have changed, with the new fit note, but the context of seeing the doctor hasn’t.”
However, Prof Sayeed Khan, who originally trained as a GP, argued that it would be unfair to blame everything on doctors. He said: “Where is the evidence of what GPs do or don’t do? Ninety per cent of the time, it us up to us patients whether or not we go back to work, or stay off. Yes, a big problem is lack of specific occupational-health training for GPs but even more important than that is the doctor/patient relationship. This needs to change, but it will take time. Basically, there are lots of reasons why someone will go off sick, but only one of those will be the actual medical condition.”
Two main difficulties in improving occupational health discussed by the panel are case management and access to information for employers – especially those in the SME sector. On the first issue, Prof Khan repeated the call by the EEF, in its sickness absence survey released last week, and by IOSH, in its survey of small businesses, for tax incentives for employers to provide the likes of physiotherapy, gym membership, etc. to improve the health of their employees.
Said the professor: “It is all down to who has the biggest incentive to do something about it – it’s not the GP, it’s mainly the employer and the health and safety professional, working with HR also.”
Lisa Roberts pointed out that health and safety practitioners should already be working with HR and the medical profession to this end, while Prof Budworth emphasised that getting the message across to all parties that the issue can and must be managed “is business-critical”.
With regard to access to information, Bob Rajan highlighted the work of Safety Groups UK, in collaboration with the HSE, to produce clear and simple guidance on health management and initiatives for small businesses. All of the panel members agreed that there is plenty of good guidance and information out there – the problem, they said, is knowing what exactly to look for and where.
Prof Budworth explained that, to address this, the Department of Health is currently working on the development of a ‘gateway’ through which people will be signposted to the various information sources available, and the right ones for them. Prof Khan agreed that consolidation is necessary, so that everyone knows where to go for what they need.
Lisa Roberts probably summed up the overall message of the debate best, saying: “As an occupational-health profession, the onus is on us to base companies requirements on their health needs. We can’t be reactive and only work on absence statistics – we need to do much more on prevention.”
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
