Stop paying for sickness, start preventing it: What is the prevention advantage?
The Government's ambition to Keep Britain Working has rightly placed prevention at the heart of the conversation about workforce health.
As economic inactivity linked to long-term ill health continues to constrain growth, employers are increasingly recognised as partners in helping people stay healthier, remain productive and work for longer.
Yet while prevention has become a policy priority, many organisations are still approaching it in the wrong way. Too often, prevention is viewed as another wellbeing initiative or employee benefit, when in reality it requires a fundamental shift in thinking.
Identify risks
If we are serious about keeping people in work, we need to move beyond reacting to illness and instead identify health risks before they become chronic conditions that affect people's ability to work.
This is where the concept of healthspan becomes increasingly important. While lifespan measures how long we live, healthspan measures how many of those years we spend in good health. Employers cannot influence every aspect of an individual's health, but they can play a significant role in extending employees' healthspan by identifying hidden risks earlier, encouraging positive behaviour change and supporting healthier working lives. As people work later into life, maintaining healthspan is becoming just as important as extending careers.
The challenge is that many of the conditions driving economic inactivity develop silently. Hypertension, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes can progress for years without obvious symptoms. By the time they appear in sickness absence figures, occupational health referrals or private medical insurance claims, opportunities for early intervention have often been missed. Traditional workforce metrics tell employers who is already unwell, but they reveal very little about who is becoming unwell.
Unaware of risks
Bluecrest’s latest analysis demonstrates the scale of this hidden challenge. Bluecrest found that 86% of employees had at least one clinically significant cardiovascular health flag, despite many remaining at work and being unaware of the risks they were carrying.
More than one-third recorded elevated blood pressure requiring clinical attention, while many also presented with raised cholesterol or elevated HbA1c levels associated with pre-diabetes. These findings suggest that poor health is often accumulating beneath the surface, long before it affects attendance or performance.
Perhaps most strikingly, this is no longer a challenge confined to older workers. Nearly one in four employees under the age of 30 already had a cardiovascular red flag in Bluecrest data. At the same time, younger employees also recorded some of the highest anxiety and depression scores.
Together, these findings challenge the assumption that chronic illness should only become a priority later in someone's career. Instead, they suggest prevention needs to begin much earlier, supporting employees before health risks become entrenched and before they begin to influence long-term workforce participation.
The data also demonstrates why many traditional wellbeing strategies struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Understanding health profiles
Workforce health is not evenly distributed. Health risks vary significantly by sector, geography, age and gender, meaning organisations often face very different health challenges despite offering similar employee benefits. Yet many employers continue to adopt broad, one-size-fits-all wellbeing programmes. Prevention is most effective when organisations understand the health profile of their own workforce and tailor interventions accordingly, rather than assuming every employee needs the same support.
This is whythe next evolution of employee benefits should be built around workforce health intelligence. Organisations have become increasingly sophisticated in using data to understand recruitment, engagement and retention, yet many know remarkably little about the health risks developing across their workforce.
Better health intelligence allows employers to identify patterns, prioritise investment and intervene earlier, replacing reactive sickness management with proactive prevention.
Strategic investment
The business case is compelling. Declining employee health is estimated to cost the UK economy around £30 billion every year, much of it through presenteeism rather than sickness absence, while around 300,000 people leave the workforce annually because of work-limiting ill health.
Employers are already paying the price of poor health through lost productivity, recruitment pressures and increasing healthcare costs. Prevention should therefore be viewed not as an additional wellbeing expense but as a strategic investment in workforce resilience and long-term business performance.
Importantly, prevention works when it leads to action. Among employees who completed repeat health assessments, 84% took at least one positive step to improve their health, while 22.2% sought clinical advice they otherwise would not have accessed.
Those returning for repeat assessments also demonstrated measurable improvements in cardiovascular risk, including reductions in blood pressure among participants who initially presented with hypertension. This demonstrates that earlier identification, combined with practical support, can change behaviour and improve health outcomes before more serious interventions become necessary.
Measurable strategy
As policymakers, employers and healthcare providers consider how to tackle economic inactivity, prevention must become more than a policy aspiration. It needs to become a measurable strategy underpinned by robust workforce health data. Employers cannot replace the NHS, but they are uniquely placed to identify hidden health risks earlier and create environments that support healthier working lives.
For too long, the conversation around employee health has focused on paying for treatment once people become ill. The real prevention advantage lies in extending healthspan, using workforce health intelligence to identify emerging risks and intervening before illness affects productivity, retention and long-term workforce participation. If we are serious about keeping Britain working, that is where the next generation of investment should begin.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Bluecrest Wellness
Bluecrest Wellness offers high-quality health screenings.
