21 April 2016
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Improved ease of access (46%) and increased availability (46%) of preventive health services for employees are key for better workplace health in the next five years, AXA PPP has said.
And 40% of the decision makers surveyed agree that increased availability of reactive health services for employees would help to improve the health of the UK workforce in the next five years.
The research, which polled 1,000 purchasing decision makers, marks the launch of AXA PPP healthcare's new proposition for medium and larger sized employers, Advance.
The decision makers polled by the healthcare company predict that mental health (51%), obesity/high body mass index (44%) and high blood pressure (30%) will be the biggest challenges to employee health over the next five years.
Three quarters of decision makers (75%) agreed that employers should proactively support their employees to manage their health and wellbeing; accounting for why 77% of employers said their company currently has a health and wellbeing strategy in place.
Chris Horlick, distribution director for AXA PPP healthcare, said: "It's encouraging to see so many businesses acknowledging they have a degree of responsibility for employee health and wellbeing at work and, as a result, implementing strategies to support this.
"However, businesses, and arguably the workplace health services industry as a whole, can struggle to define what holistic health and wellbeing strategies should look like. This can mean that in practice they fail to include measurable objectives, thereby preventing meaningful evaluation of their impact."
