Buyers and purchasers of occupational health and wellbeing products and services need to retain a healthy scepticism of what salespeople are telling them, and constantly be asking ‘how does this align?’, a panel discussion heard last week.
The debate, held at last week’s MAD World Festival of Workplace Culture, Employee Health and Wellbeing, brought together Nick Pahl, chief executive of the Society of Occupational Medicine (SOM); Elton Dorkin, chief medical officer at Rio Tinto; Steve Iley, chief medical officer at Jaguar Land Rover; and Professor Jo Yarker, professor in occupational psychology at Birkbeck University in London.
The discussion was, in part, framed around the launch by SOM last month of an occupational health buyers’ guide, with Pahl pointing out that it was very much about ensuring people purchasing products and services, and who are perhaps being inundated with sales pitches, can best navigate the market.
Occupational health services
Profession gears up to promote Occupational Health Awareness Week
Two-thirds of employees never referred to occupational health
“One of the key things that really came through was that there is so much out there it is really hard to know what is the best thing for your organisation, your investment and your people? And then how do you achieve and then embed some of those practices?” explained Professor Yarker, who was a key author of the guide.
“A provider will sell you anything; I have been a provider – and I will sell you anything!” conceded Iley. “Often providers have salespeople who are not the account managers; the sales people will target what they sell, then go on to the next one. The account manager then picks up the pieces.
“So, you need to understand who you’re working with. When you look at the multitude of suppliers out there, they are all offering you lots of different things. You need to stop and think about, ‘how does this fit into my overall strategy?’. You need a strategy, your business needs to understand your strategy. But needs and wants are different. Often the business wants something but needs something else. So you need to try to work out how to cover that,” he added.
“In many organisations, especially once they reach a certain size, everybody is interested in wellbeing, everybody thinks they own it, everyone wants to buy things, and you end up with multiple different disparate pools of provision that don’t fit together. The biggest problem we often see is an uneducated buyer who just wants to get something in to tick the box of ‘wellbeing’ but that does not fit with what the whole service needs to be,” Iley said.
He also emphasised that going for the cheapest option may often end up as something of a false economy. “If you cut costs, you will get a cut-cost service,” Iley emphasised.
“You need to think about, ‘what exactly am I trying to do here?’,” agreed Dorkin. “Safety, health – how are these things going to work together for the company?”
It is also about working to identify, and then plug, the gaps in provision, which will vary depending on geography, type of role and healthcare system. “What, here in the UK, is the NHS doing; is it working? What is private healthcare doing; it is working? What’s the gap?” he pointed out.
Iley then also highlighted that ‘provider’ in this context can mean the NHS. Jaguar Land Rover, for example, works closely with the NHS on interventions such as liver screening and heart health checks; it is also set to be one of the companies testing the government’s pilot at-work NHS Health Checks.
“The NHS is a provider. If you’ve worked in the NHS, you will know the NHS is actually not one organisation; it is a very disparate group of organisations all working under the banner of the NHS. Finding the right person to work with is your biggest problem,” Iley said.
“But once you have found people to work with, you can actually work in partnership with the NHS and there are win/wins out there that will cost you only some effort to set up,” he added.
Often the NHS struggles to deliver services in community whereas, in the workplace, these services might be relatively easy to set up and deliver. With liver scans, for example, an NHS mobile screening unit can work through a targeted list, with people only needing to be away from their role for an hour or so rather than a whole day or half day.
“The NHS are willing and keen [to work with employers],” Iley argued. “And the new government’s strategy is to shift care out of hospitals and into the community. Our workplaces are ‘the community’, too, and we have the people – especially the working-age population, which is also what the government is going after,” he added.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday