David Puls: How Bombardier Transportation’s health and wellbeing strategy delivered £1m savings

We wanted to move from providing treatment alone to preventing key employee absence and promoting a health and wellbeing culture, focusing on musculoskeletal (MSK) issues. The strategy involved tackling three key areas: on-site events, digital engagement, and treatment and management of health issues.

Goals

One aim was to reduce PMI spend through long-term investment, rather than just managing employees back to work and reduce employee absences using data analysis to understand the causes and focus on their prevention.

We also wanted to raise awareness and encourage health and wellbeing across the entire workforce, through online engagement, events and content and educate employees on the importance of health in the workplace, adding to the award-winning safety measures in place.

We planned to educate staff across production and engineering sites on MSK risks, prevent future MSK issues – reducing costs to the organisation through absences and PMI claims – and integrate all health and wellbeing products to make obtaining support for MSK problems easier and simpler.

Innovation

Within the rail manufacturing sector, most occupational health spend focuses upon reactive activity and sickness absences costs the industry is £316 million per year, with MSK conditions a key cause of absence.

Bombardier has taken a preventative approach and simplified and streamlined its wellbeing offering, thus all services, information and health tools are provided and managed in one place. This single point of access gives employees immediate access to a choice of services and initial calls can provide advice and book treatment. This means Bombardier employees receive consistency no matter where they are due to virtual and remote services.

Due to shift patterns, onsite physiotherapists are not viable and therefore Bombardier employees use over-the-phone physiotherapy consultations, reducing time spent out-of-work on GP visits. Following the call, employees are sent emails containing step-by-step MSK treatment plans with videos and tips which employees can carry out themselves. Not only does this empower employees with the opportunity to self-manage conditions, it presents great savings to Bombardier as an alternative to face-to-face treatment and has a less disrupting effect on productivity as calls can be taken anywhere.

As health assessments are usually only available to senior management, the 20-minute mini health assessments give everyone the opportunity to identify their own health risks. This also helped Bombardier identify a clear strategy for education and prevention, based on common issues arisen from anonymous employee data.

Permanent employees are able to access MSK services without a GP referral, meaning less time is taken off work and problems can be dealt with earlier. This often results in quicker recovery times and lowers chances of needing surgery.

Due to the large number of sites and locations, Bombardier introduced ‘health champions’ to manage health and wellbeing at each site. This empowered managers to be proactive about health issues and ensured strong awareness on where to find health services.

Results

Absence costs have reduced from £2,655 to £1,365 per absence and from an average of 8.2 days to 4.1 days per year. MSK absences have declined month-on-month by 7.7% and direct referrals to an MSK physician – with a potential quicker recovery – have increased by 50%.

In addition, PMI claimants for MSK increased by 22% in just over two years while the total paid out increased by just 0.1% during the same period. This indicates treatment is being delivered earlier and more efficiently, meaning patients don’t have to receive the most drastic treatment.

Use of self-referral services have increased overall by 129%, indicating a phenomenal increase in awareness and recognition of health services and providing significant cost-savings associated with early interventions.

By implementing an overall health and wellbeing strategy, Bombardier has delivered overall savings of £1 million.

This article was written by David Puls, reward expert at Bombardier Transportation