With this week being Occupational Health Awareness Week, the profession needs to be talking about how it is going to meet rising demand for OH services, despite the ongoing difficulties many face in recruiting OH nurses and doctors, argues Dr Kevin Bailey.
This week’s Occupational Health Awareness Week, run by SOM (the Society of Occupational Medicine) comes at an important time for occupational health.
Whilst awareness around the issue of work and health continues to grow, along with greater acceptance that good work is good for health, there remains a long way to go.
According to the SOM’s 2019 report The Future of the Occupational Health Workforce, just 45% of the UK workforce has access to occupational health advice and facilities, although there is reason to believe that workforce access may be even more limited.
A YouGov poll carried out in May this year, for example, found that 20% of respondents had never heard of occupational health.
Rising need for workplace health support
While these figures show a marked lack of access and awareness regarding occupational health, they do not reflect a lack of need. Around 140 million working days are lost annually to sickness absence, costing the UK economy approximately £22bn per year.
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The government has taken note and proposed a number of measures to assist people with long-term health conditions and disabilities to enter and stay in work, as part of its response to the Health is everyone’s business consultation in 2019.
Further insight has come from SOM’s report, Occupational Health: The Value Proposition, published in March. It discussed the various factors that motivate employers to provide access to occupational health services, along with the benefits that OH can bring for employees, employers, and the economy.
This insight is indispensable in the new OH landscape. No longer simply a matter of preventing accidents and occupational illnesses, workplace health has now expanded to encompass a broader definition of workplace wellness. It is definition in which the outcome is not merely the absence of disease, but a balanced state of physical and mental harmony.
Awareness of mental health has increased exponentially since the start of the pandemic, with a growing appreciation of the cumulative mental health burden of factors including long Covid, longer working hours, isolation because of home working, and the blurring of work-life balance.
Demand and capacity pressures
More individuals require support to adapt to new work environments or return to work, while the pressure on the NHS has made it more difficult to access support services.
The challenge for the OH community is to meet this increased demand with a corresponding increase in capacity, despite the ongoing difficulty in recruiting OH nurses and doctors.”
All these factors point to a likely rise in demand for OH services. The challenge for the OH community is to meet this increased demand with a corresponding increase in capacity, despite the ongoing difficulty in recruiting OH nurses and doctors.
This can be achieved through innovative solutions and new service models, increased use of multidisciplinary teams, and the upskilling of allied health professionals.
For example, at Health Management we are recruiting qualified OH clinicians and, through the use of in-house clinical training programmes, constantly working to enhance our existing team of occupational health professionals.
Technology and automation, too, will increasingly need to play a part in both delivery of services and in demonstrating performance and returns on investment in occupational health services.
However, ultimately, while we understand and embrace technological solutions, we also appreciate we must not lose the value of human-to-human contact, whether through face-to-face support or via other means, such as video conferencing or telephone consultations.
