Research and innovation are already playing an important role in addressing the growing challenge of workforce health – but could more be done to connect workplaces and working adults to relevant research projects and maximise their benefit?
In this blog, Dr Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, Head of Strategy, Research Engagement and Inclusion at the National Institute for Health and Care Research South London Regional Research Delivery Network (NIHR RDN) and George London, Head of Communications at the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London introduce a new multi-year project building new relationships between researchers, employers and the workforce.
Workforce health has become an increasingly significant concern in the UK in recent years; the government’s Keep Britain Working report (published earlier this year) called it a “quiet but urgent crisis”.
The report sets out a stark reality: one in five working-age adults are currently out of the workforce, with ill health being a major barrier to employment. Long-term challenges impacting employment such as the growing prevalence of musculoskeletal conditions have been joined by worrying new issues – most prominently an increase in mental health conditions in young people.
Employment has an important relationship with health. For the individual, not being able to work increases the risk of experiencing poverty, which we know is one of the largest drivers of health inequity and poorer health outcomes. For employers, a workforce impacted by ill health means lost productivity and disruption. For society, the cost of increased illness-related unemployment (or underemployment) is diminished growth, higher spending on health and care, and more pressure on NHS services.
Reversing the trend: what role could health and care research play?
Supporting a healthier, more resilient workforce is a clear priority across government and health and care.
The Health Innovation Network South London has a number of projects intended to contribute to this objective. These range from co-designing a new digitally-enabled pathway for children and young people to improve outcomes for the mental health conditions which increasingly go on to keep young people out of work, to ESCAPE-pain, the award-winning musculoskeletal pain innovation which we have helped scale into a programme helping thousands of patients live healthier and more productive lives.
The same is true for the RDN, which has supported numerous studies through the NIHR Work and Health initiative and beyond. Recent examples like Improving work participation in people with physical long-term health conditions,Reducing health and work inequalities and extending working lives and Creating Healthy Jobs show how the RDN is supporting delivery of the evidence base needed to drive change in this priority area.
To improve the health of Britain’s workforce, collaboration between organisations and across sectors is critical. In this spirit, the HIN and NIHR RDN have recently joined forces on a new project looking more specifically at how health and care researchers, the workforce and employers might be able to work together to benefit everyone involved.
On the face of it, the rationale is straightforward:
- For workers, participating in research can offer opportunities to contribute to better evidence, learn more about their health, and in some cases access new interventions, additional monitoring or support;
- For employers, a workforce that is both more engaged with managing its own health and potentially healthier as a result of taking part in research brings productivity benefits;
- For researchers, working with targeted employers can help to improve engagement with underrepresented groups in studies – such as routine and manual workers, who often experience a range of health inequalities. Employers may also understand the practical barriers their staff face to taking part in research, such as shift patterns, digital access, language, confidence, or lack of time.
Our project will look to explore whether this rationale holds true in practice, and whether a mutually beneficial model for driving employer-supported engagement could be established to potentially scale in the future.
Delivering real-world impact through an insight-led approach
Concepts such as anchor institutions reflect the increasing recognition that health and care organisations can have a positive influence on health outcomes through engaging with local communities in ways that extend far beyond traditional clinical interventions.
Our project aims to build on some of the learnings from these types of projects, while developing our understanding of how health and care research specifically might be integrated into wider community engagement.
Over the next two years, we intend to partner with a small number of employers in south London to understand how their staff and management view health and care research, and the opportunities and barriers to embedding research into working life.
We will use what we learn from staff and managers to design and test a practical approach that helps more people hear about, understand and consider taking part in relevant research via their place of work.
Our main focus will be connecting staff to studies looking at some of the conditions we know have the greatest impact on working-age adults: mental health conditions, musculoskeletal conditions and cardiovascular disease.
We’re also particularly interested in partnering with organisations in sectors we know experience especially significant burdens from ill health, such as local authorities.
We’ll be sharing updates and learnings throughout the project in the form of blogs and other resources. If you’re a health and care professional, employer or researcher interested in our work – please do get in touch with us.
Find out more
Interested in finding out more about this work?
Get in touch with the project team.