Why Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing is a Board Level Issue

I think that health, mental health and well-being will become the next board-level agenda item and stay there for the next 10 or 20 years at least.

Now, we're already starting to see well being as an industry creep in, and there's been movement in the ESG agenda from recognising it's just about environment to the s part, which is social, of which how organisations treat both their employees but the society and their stakeholders around it, you know, in terms of health is important.

But the main reason that I think that it will become a board level agenda item, is because we're going to have to have some very robust discussions as a society about who is responsible for and who pays for health care.

This was happening slightly before the pandemic, but what we've seen in the pandemic is that the NHS in the UK where I am, is now full there, it's slightly broken, we have the longest waiting lists since records began.

And there's a really fundamental point that will start to play out which is who pays for health care?

What is the contract between the individual looking after their own health and mental health, the government provision of health, mental health in terms of NHS support for primary and secondary care, and where organisations fit within all of this, we have organisations already buying things like private health insurance and occupational health.

But that's always been seen as an employee benefit. When employees are off sick, they are left to go through the NHS to see their GP to have waiting lists, they might get through the queue quicker in terms of their secondary care, because of health insurance, but it's very much that you go off and see your GP provided by the NHS, and organisation pay sick pay.

So we're going to have some really interesting conversations where health and mental health and well-being are seen as business issues. And just as you would invest in a new office block or a new factory, or new roles in your organisation, we will increasingly see forward-thinking organisations starting to talk about and think about health, from the lens of how we put in robust programmes to make our employees healthy and safe, but also buying health care to make sure that when people are unwell, there are GPS available maybe quicker than going through the NHS, there's secondary care that's available that actually a business investing in this as a business expense.

It will have a return on investment because employees will be off sick for shorter amounts of time. And you need healthy and mentally healthy employees for any business to run. So I predict that in the next decade and 20 years, who pays for health care, the responsibility of the organisation, the responsibility of the individual will become important topics because they can't not you know, we are used to a world where we don't pay for health care or we do through taxes. And that's just not sustainable. And we're already starting to see board-level discussions about health creep in, in a way as never before, such as no jobs, no jobs if you are unvaccinated.

Some organisations have now decided that you cannot be employed. Likewise, if you're unvaccinated, some organisations have decided that they won't pay sick pay. So we are seeing this crossover between public health and organisational business strategy.

I predict that only going to increase as we realised that we can no longer afford the health care system that we've got.

So that's why I believe that health, mental health and well-being will become the top board-level agenda item for the next 10-20 years.

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