Do benefits in terms of healthcare really help to reduce absence figures, stress rates and staff turnover figures in the long term? We asked several spokespeople including Timothy Walker, Director General of the Health and Safety Executive their views on whether prevention really is better than cure; scroll below to see their responses.
Timothy Walker, Director General of the Health and Safety Executive
We, at the Health & Safety Executive, believe that sensible health and safety is about managing risks not eliminating them. People are the key resource of many businesses and are the focus of the Health and Safety at Work Act – which aims at putting in place systems that prevent people being injured or made ill by their work. This put us firmly in the prevention ‘camp’, but not at any price: we are talking about sensible measures.
We all need to identify the key risks to our businesses. They need to be managed well to avoid detriment to the efficiency and profitability of the business and reducing productivity. In this, health and safety is no different to any other aspect of business.
Many people are prepared to accept some degree of risk and do so in their every day lives. What they need is some control that gives them the right to say ‘enough, stop’, and also the opportunity to contribute to what is acceptable in the way of risk and control measures. We believe that workers and managers working together are the best people to make workplaces safer from harm.
Unfortunately mistakes are made, and some incidents are not reasonably foreseeable. The important thing here is that managers learn any lessons that emerge. And then act to prevent further similar occurrences.
We also need to help those who want to work but have particular difficulties in doing so. At this stage we need to go into ‘curative’ mode to provide the necessary help and support to get people into work and stay there.
Work-related ill health is the biggest cause of working days lost with the major causes being stress and musculo-skeletal disorders – backache, RSI etc. Recent experience is that HR Managers are key partners in developing systems to control the incidence of these conditions as they understand the value of good people management – keeping people at work, maintaining the available skills and competence and having resources for productive work.
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Neil Shah, founder of the Stress Management Society
Without a doubt. On a professional level, employers should be keen to encourage a healthy lifestyle and a good work/life balance. The results are lower levels of staff sickness and turnover. Morale improves and you become an ‘employer of choice’. In addition, prevention has to be better than cure because you can’t always cure the damage that stress does to the human body.
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Duncan Brown, Assistant Director-General CIPD
The picture in terms of corporate healthcare and absence management in the UK is a decidedly mixed one. Over half the organisations in the CIPD’s comprehensive annual survey of absence management highlighted an increase particularly in stress-related absence over the last 12 months.
But the good news is that three-quarters of them were doing something about it. While bonus schemes for attendance and the removal of some sick pay benefits make the newspaper headlines, what we are actually seeing developing is a more informed and broadly managed approach.
Companies are assessing what the costs and causes of absence are and the role of ill-health in that. They are paying greater attention to occupational health with a range of interventions. And the most forward thinking are encompassing health and its promotion rather than just ill-health in their approach and assisting their employees to achieve a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
Ninety years ago Edward Cadbury said that employee welfare and business profitability were different sides of the same coin and the HR profession started out then as the Institute of Welfare Workers. UK companies helped by their HR staff are at last recognising the wisdom of Cadbury’s observation.
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Carl Laider, Managing Director of Prevent Plc
Prevention is usually better than having to manage the implementation and side effects of a cure later. However, prevention tends not to be a single solution, and needs to be cost effective and sustainable. Changing lifestyle is better than medication, but regrettably, our experience reveals that work-life balance and modern ‘I want it now’ culture, means many people, even when knowing what is needed to prevent future issues, are not prepared to change, hoping there is a low cost and easy cure to help them further down the line!
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