Employers are facing a multitude of challenges across their businesses today, including rising health-related absences.
In 2025, the Labour Force Survey estimated 148.8 million working days were lost because of sickness or injury – around 4.4 days per worker.
Some absences relate to complex medical conditions; alongside the everyday frustration employees may face in accessing timely care.
At the same time, organisations face growing expectations from staff, policymakers, and customers alike to be both supportive and productive.
This raises an urgent question: how do we keep more people well enough to stay in work, supported to thrive there, and able to enjoy life outside work?
Understanding the problem
The scale of the problem is hard to ignore. There are 800,000 more people out of work now because of health problems compared to 2019, with a further 600,000 projected by 2030.
This is not just a workforce problem; it is an economic inactivity problem.
Published in November 2025, Keep Britain Working makes clear that health-related economic inactivity is central to workforce sustainability.
Mercer Marsh Benefits brought together senior clinicians, workplace health specialists, large UK employers, and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) representatives to discuss this.
The goal was not to find a single right answer, but to surface what is working – and what is not – and identify what can realistically be implemented in organisations with real constraints and real budgets.
Fundamentally, the UK cannot improve productivity or labour market participation without making it easier for people to access healthcare and stay connected to work when sick.
That much is not controversial, what is harder is turning that conclusion into action.
The roundtable message was consistent: progress does not require a perfect system. It requires an understanding of the support that employees will use and managers can activate early.
Effective data use
To help employers understand what they need, they need to use data effectively.
Most employers have plenty of data: absence, Employee Assistant Programme (EAP) utilisation, claims, turnover, and engagement scores. The problem is it sits in silos, making it hard to spot rising risk or tell what’s working.
If this data is used well, it can highlight hotspots by location, role, or demographic.
It is possible to flag trends early, track whether communications and manager actions are shifting behaviour, and connect health investment to operational outcomes.
This also improves governance: the conversation shifts from “what do we offer?” to “where is risk increasing, and what is the best response?”
Most organisations offer some mix of support: an EAP, occupational health (OH), group risk benefits, perhaps a wellbeing app or private medical insurance (PMI).
Yet many of these same employers continue to report rising mental health absence and persistent musculoskeletal (MSK) issues.
Patchwork benefits or navigable pathway
The discussion revealed that fragmentation was a real issue.
Many employers have accumulated a patchwork of solutions: multiple apps, providers, and entry points, with little understanding on what to use when.
For someone who needs help, that can be overwhelming. They don’t need options – they need, clarity, simplification, and better signposting of what already exists.
From here the answer is pathway design, a clear route to the right support at the right time.
That means defining where employees start (e.g. virtual GP, EAP, nurse triage) and providing clear escalation to clinical services.
It also requires organisations to integrate OH and HR, so adjustments do not stall, and to link communications to moments that matter; sickness absence, return to work, or a manager initiating a welfare conversation.
Done well, this turns a menu into a usable experience that supports prevention, early intervention, and faster recovery.
It also helps break the cycle of late-stage claims, prolonged absence, and reactive case management.
Line managers remain the operational hinge
Line managers are crucial to providing this support.
They shape workload, flexibility, psychological safety, and whether support is activated early or late. Yet according to those at the discussion, many managers are underprepared.
This is not through a lack of care, but because they fear saying the wrong thing, lack guidance, or do not have the time alongside delivery targets.
They need support and guidance to understand escalation routes, training grounded in real scenarios (such as mental health conversations, MSK adjustments, how to use EAP and OH pathways effectively), and access to clinical input when they need it.
Employers who implement these simple basic steps are likely to see the greatest progress.
They are not waiting for the perfect system, they are working more effectively with the one they have.
The momentum behind Keep Britain Working creates a real opportunity.
The change that matters will come from employers which move beyond adding benefits and start designing systems that work in the real world – especially for the people most likely to be missed.
