Dame Carol Black calls for urgent reform to workplace health services

It's interesting that the media today are largely focusing on the incapacity benefits angle of Dame Carol's review, but for companies the key issue has to be protecting their staff to reduce costs.

Dame Carol's review highlights the need to detect health problems early and take action in order to reduce the absence costs, and proposes a huge expansion of occupational health services such as physiotherapy and stress counselling. 
 
Early interventions like this typically show massive returns on investment, but nowhere near as great as taking cost-effective preventative action in the first place!
 
At PostureMinder, our concern is for computer workers' health.
 
Although computer jobs clearly aren't as dangerous as deep sea fishing or working on an oil rig, it does carry risks.  The sheer number of computer workers means even low sickness absence rates will contribute hugely to the figures found in Dame Carol's review.
 
Not only that, for evey person who takes time off with a back, neck or shoulder problem or RSI, headaches or eye fatigue, the HSE suggests there are up to 15 who suffer in silence.
 
If you've ever suffered back pain through hunching over your keyboard, or found yourself stressed and headachy from working too long without a break, you'll recognise that there are enormous hidden costs of underperformance due to these low-level health issues on top of the absence figures in Dame Carol's review.
 
The proven solution to minimise these problems is incredibly simple - sit in a good posture at your computer, and take regular short breaks.  Easy, right? 

If you look around your office, how many people do you see following this simple advice?   If your office is like most, it'll be almost no-one!

That's why we invented our award-winning well-being and productivity software - PostureMinder - to help computer users to help themselves.  It gives you a friendly nudge in the right direction whenever you sit badly or forget to take a break, without trying to force the matter and raise your stress levels in the process!    This is great for helping you get over an episode of back pain, and even better for reducing your risk of developing aches and pains in the first place.

Besides protecting your health, improving your working habits will improve your productivity and concentration, reduce stress and help you feel better at the end of the day.  We'd argue that there are knock-on benefits - if you end the working day with aches and pains, you've got to be less likely to go and do some exercise or cook a healthy meal than if you leave work feeling fresh and pain-free.
 
Dame Carol's review will hopefully prompt a lot of UK companies to take a careful look at what preventative steps they can take to reduce the costs of absences, underperformance, management time and compensation risk due to these problems.  

Please visit www.postureminder.co.uk/business to find out how PostureMinder can help your organisation take cost-effective preventative action to reduce costs.