Question

What is the relationship between health and productivity? What are the barriers to achieving a healthier population? What can health plans and employers do to overcome these barriers? What role do absenteeism and presenteeism have on the employer’s health-related costs? Nash-Population health

Answer 1

- Research on the relationship between health and productivity finds healthy workers are more productive at work than unhealthy workers4. Health and wellbeing programs that address the health risks of workers within the organisation lead to increased staff engagement, reduced turnover and higher productivity.

- One of the greatest barriers to successful population health management is the change managementrequired to implement new ways of working. For instance, it will be necessary to work in multi-disciplinary teams, providing care remotely and deploying well-defined pathways across care settings. Adaptive change is always difficult because it requires shifting processes, roles and responsibilities, giving up previous incentives and starting out on a new learning curve. For good reason, the healthcare sector tends to rely on tried and tested, evidence-based practices in order to safeguard patient safety and quality of care. No matter how valuable they have been in the past, these practices must evolve in embracing the digital era if we are to make substantial progress.

The second barrier is the required changes in the reimbursement model.

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-  Absenteeism can most easily be understood as when employees are not working at all and have taken a day of absence from the workplace. An employee will have either called out sick; have had a family emergency, or a prior engagement that must be met. Absenteeism has always been a delicate subject for employees and employers because of its implications behind the scenes.

A good way to describe presenteeism is being present at the workplace but not being productive due to an illness, lack of motivation, or work overload. Presenteeism can cause a large variety of work related issues. An example of this would be having an employee come into work with a bad cold or the flu. Having this employee come in can put your other employees health at risk and the reality is if they have fallen ill their quality of work is going to suffer as well. A big contribution to presenteeism and the highest; as you can see on the chart below is due to chronic diseases or disorders. When someone has type 2 diabetes, it may be very difficult to focus on work when they are worried about their blood glucose level.