Managing for health
The health and wellbeing of our people is key to the success of our business. We focus on health screening, risk and stress reduction, health promotion and rehabilitation.
We collect and analyse health and wellbeing data from periodic staff medicals and from referrals to our occupational health and wellbeing provider, BUPA. This helps us to identify programmes to address our top health issues.
Our key health issues
In 2009/10 we used data from 4,212 periodic staff medicals and 2,475 referrals to BUPA to identify our key health issues as:
- Musculoskeletal problems including back, ankle, knee and hip problems: 33 per cent (2008: 32 per cent)
- Stress and psychological conditions: 21 per cent (2008: 18 per cent) related to psychological conditions in 2009. Of these, 40 per cent were due to depression, 30 per cent stress, and 19 per cent anxiety
- Heart and circulatory conditions: 6.8 per cent
- Diabetes: 4.4 per cent.
We also found that obesity was an issue. 37 per cent of employees screened at periodic medicals were overweight, with 24 per cent being obese and 3.4 per cent being morbidly obese.
Healthy initiatives
We used this knowledge to target our top issues and in 2009/10 we introduced initiatives such as:
- Physiotherapy services for employees suffering a work-related accident
- A pilot of an online personal health assessment tool for employees as part of our Positive Health Programme
- A DVD to raise awareness of Care First, a 24/7 counselling and information service available to all our employees. We also produced a booklet called ‘There is only one you’, aimed at helping our people take control of their own emotional health
- A Health Fair guidance pack for managers to run local health events, which was tested in February 2010 at our Wakefield Kirkgate depot. You can read more about this initiative in our related case studies section of this page
- An update of our medical standard on hand-arm vibration screening. We continue to work on health screening to minimise the risks associated with noise, vibration, night work or hazardous substances.