The value of occupational health provision in supporting wellbeing at work

Occupational health (OH) is a multi-disciplinary approach to maintaining the wellbeing of those in a workplace. It involves preventing and removing ill-health and developing solutions to keep staff with health issues at work. OH professionals provide independent advice on staff unable to work due to long-term or short-term health problems, and on organisation-wide steps to reduce sickness absence. This includes:

assessing fitness to work regarding ill-health capability dismissal or ill-health retirement
advising on compliance under the Equality Act 2010 and on reasonable adjustments required
carrying out pre-employment or preplacement health assessments
developing health and wellbeing related strategy and policies and providing health advice to employees.

OH organises successful return to work activity, protecting vulnerable employees from workplace hazards. It can assist organisations in keeping employees safe at all stages of their working life. Effective OH is analytical, cathartic and therapeutic.

We recently produced a report, The Value of Occupational Health to Workplace Wellbeing, which examined how OH practitioners and providers can add value to workplace wellbeing initiatives. OH practitioners cannot deliver change by themselves. Instead, they build the capacity to deliver change through proactive and preventive approaches that can entail making changes to job design or working practices. For example, there is a clear role for OH providers to engage in line manager training around return to work processes, making workplace adjustments in a fair and equitable manner and supporting workers with health conditions or caring responsibilities.

This is key since a worker’s relationship with their line manager is perhaps the most important relationship in the workplace. Research has indicated that supportive relationships between workers and their line managers are associated with better health and wellbeing outcomes, including sustainable return to work following sickness absence due to common mental health problems. Line managers also have a major influence on how work is performed, clarifying role expectations, delegating authority to make decisions and role modelling appropriate behaviours – thus potentially affecting job quality and social relations at work.

Research also shows that job quality influences health and wellbeing outcomes. Job quality includes areas such as terms of employment, pay and benefits, health and safety (relating to minimising risks for physical and psychological health and safety), the nature of work, voice and representation and work/life balance.

Workplace health promotion programmes targeted at changing health behaviours (eg. alcohol consumption, smoking, exercise and diet) are familiar to OH practitioners. They understand that such programmes should also be aimed at bringing about a shift in organisational cultures. Where a workplace environment is created in which communication concerning health and wellbeing is better received by workers, it can facilitate the introduction of a range of other initiatives targeted at improving health and wellbeing.

The author is Nick Pahl, CEO of the Society of Occupational Medicine.