Difficulties in accessing NHS care will have the biggest impact on reshaping workforce health and wellbeing strategies over the next five years, according to employer research.
HR leaders also said the effect of work on mental health was a close second most important factor in health benefits implementation.
The Axa Health research found preventative measures were also a key consideration, but employers’ primary business driver when implementing these appears to be improving employee motivation or performance (29%).
In contrast only 21% of the 284 questioned said it was to mitigate future health claims or premium levels and 19% said it was to mitigate people risk to the business.
This appears to contradict other results where 75% of employers said preventative health and wellbeing strategies were the best way to mitigate health costs over the next five years.
That was the largest proportion with access to early care through digital health tools such as remote GPs (63%) also seen as a key factor in easing health costs.
The survey conducted by the Reward and Employee Benefits Association (REBA) also found claims data as significantly more valuable to organisations in managing health costs than purely the level of claims costs.
This was particularly so where organisations had a focus on mitigating future health claim and premium levels (75%), compared to other less-focused employers (52%).
Larger organisations were also more likely to value the importance of claims data and data relating to the level of claims costs.
More than half (53%) of respondents with more than 5,000 employees valued claims data, compared with 48% of companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, and 33% of those with fewer than 1,000 employees.
