A lack of a common approach between government departments is leading to complications in tackling workplace inactivity due to poor health in the UK, according to Christian van Stolk, executive vice president at Rand Europe.
Speaking at an Association of British Insurers (ABI) event, van Stolk explained that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) often have different priorities.
“If I was go to DWP and talk about employment rates, nobody cares about wellbeing there,” van Stolk explained, “It’s the need to improve employment rates.”
“If a trial shows improvements in wellbeing, that’s fine, but what does it do in terms of employment rates? That’s what they are obsessed about.”
Conversely, van Stolk maintained that for health insurers and the Department of Health and Social Care, the emphasis is ensuring a healthier UK workforce.
“So if you think about the communication between those departments, the sense is DWP focuses on employment rates and Department for Health and Social Care focus on health,” van Stolk explained.
“Therefore there is no commonality in terms of approach.”
Productivity focus for employers
However, van Stolk noted that when she visits employers a different element of productivity became more important and this could lead to different types of measurement taking over.
“The real issue they face is productivity and they are more worried about the presence of their employees and actually doing a good job,” he continued.
“Then you get into discussions around health-related productivity and typically you get into these depressing debates about sickness absence management.
“You hear: ‘We have just introduced a new tool to track the sickness absence of our staff’ and all these different things.
“And that in itself can be a limiting approach in terms of improving this.”
Different stakeholders might have a slightly different spin on the outcomes that they are thinking about, van Stolk added.
“That also leads to communication issues between different groups of stakeholders so you don’t have that common approach and commonality,” he said.
“If you think about a fragmented system, you are thinking about slightly different outcome measures even when they’re playing for the same team as in government.
“That leads to some of the complications that we have.”