How Operose Health filled a painful gap in its employees' healthcare
When Operose Health invited its 1,800+ employees to share open, free-text feedback on how the organisation could better support their wellbeing, dental care wasn't an area anyone expected to dominate the responses.
But as the answers came in, one issue surfaced again and again, unprompted and in employees' own words: getting to a dentist had become nearly impossible.
The scale of the response stood out. The need for accessible dental care was volunteered repeatedly, across roles and locations, by staff describing cancelled appointments, months-long waiting lists and pain they were simply having to live with.
For an organisation that itself delivers NHS primary care to more than 700,000 patients, hearing that its own 1,800-strong workforce couldn't get basic dental treatment was a signal too strong and consistent to overlook.
Missed working days
Recent NHS data details the extent of the shortage; 97% of people trying to register as a new NHS dental patient in England were unsuccessful. An estimated 14 million working adults in the UK are living with unmet dental needs, 23 million working days are missed every year in the UK due to preventable dental issues.
For many, the constraint is no longer cost, it's whether an appointment exists at all. Problems that a routine check-up would once have caught early are instead left to worsen, turning into avoidable pain, more complex treatment and time away from work.
That last point mattered particularly to Operose Health. Employees dealing with dental pain are more likely to take time off, or to stay at work while distracted by discomfort, an effect that ripples through a frontline healthcare workforce responsible for patient care. Every unplanned absence can affect continuity of care and increase reliance (and spend) on agency staff.
Building a business case
Operose Health acted directly on what its employees had requested. The organisation partnered with Toothfairy, a regulated digital dental clinic, to give every employee, more than 1,800 people across over 80 locations, rapid access to UK-registered dentists. The service includes on-demand clinical advice, video consultations, prescriptions where clinically appropriate, treatment navigation and ongoing support, removing the wait that has come to define NHS dental access.
Toothfairy helped build a business case for the executive team at Operose Health, uncovering data which echoed the employees’ voice in the survey:
- 86% of colleagues are likely to have some kind of dental concern
- Approximately 7,879 estimated across the workforce at any given time
- £400,000+ of absence cost per year caused by dental issues
- £284,000 net ROI on prevention-first intervention, delivered in 4 weeks.
“Our colleagues told us that accessing dental care had become increasingly difficult, and it was something that came through consistently in staff surveys,” said Paul Rushton, director of people and culture at Operose Health.
“We wanted to respond by providing practical support that helps remove one of the barriers many people now face when looking after their oral health. As part of our ‘Our Care Benefits’ package, partnering with Toothfairy gives our colleagues quick and convenient access to dental care, helping them get advice and support when they need it most.”
Before problems escalate
Deepak Aulak, CEO and principal dentist at Toothfairy, said the pattern Operose Health uncovered is one he sees across the country. “The biggest challenge facing dentistry today isn’t awareness, it’s access. Every day, people are delaying treatment because they simply can’t get an appointment. Unfortunately, dental problems don’t wait.
"Small issues become larger ones, leading to more pain, more complex treatment and, ultimately, more time away from work. It’s fantastic to see Operose Health listening to its people and responding before those problems escalate.”
Operose Health's decision points to a broader shift in how employers are starting to treat oral health, not as a personal matter but as a workforce issue with direct operational consequences.
It also shows how a simple mechanism, an open-ended, free-text survey rather than a scripted questionnaire, surfaced a problem that more conventional benefits reviews might have missed entirely.
In an environment where timely dental care can no longer be assumed, Operose Health's response suggests that listening to employees, in their own words, may be the fastest way for organisations to find out what's actually going wrong.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Toothfairy
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