Who’s Looking After You?

SBT takes a look at the topic of workplace healthcare, corporate medical insurance and how your staff should and can best be benefited from health schemes at work

Ensuring your staff’s wellbeing is a priority in the workplace, so – running the risk of sounding like an insurance advert – it’s important to consider implementing a thorough and extensive corporate healthcare plan. Your staff work hard, but as with life in general, sometimes things don’t go to plan.

A newly setup company, Specialists4Protection recently conducted research to support its launch and found a number of shocking statistics, including that only 31% of people claim to have life insurance or death in service benefit through work. In addition, 44% of people with children aged 18 or under, and/ or who are married and in a long term relationship don’t have life insurance. This rises to 72% when considering those without critical illness cover.

Of those people with life insurance, the vast majority were found to be hugely under-insured; around 23% of those with this cover only have the equivalent of one year’s salary, and a further 19% have two years’ income.

The research with financial advisers also revealed that 8% have stopped selling life insurance over the past five years, and a further 8% have plans to stop in the future. The main reason for this is that they want to focus more on selling investment products as this enables them to strengthen their relationship with clients.

Paul Litster, Managing Director of Specialists4Protection (www.specialists4protection.co.uk) said: “It’s alarming to see how many people who should have life insurance don’t, but also how underinsured most people with this cover are. If you have dependents, having adequate life insurance is one of the most important financial decisions you will ever make, but many people tend to just pluck a figure from the air when deciding on their level of cover without working out what their loved ones would need should they die.”

Employers of course don’t have any legal obligation to provide workplace healthcare or corporate medical insurance but, while businesses that choose to go without benefits might see a short term boost, long-term success could be at stake if you decide to head down that road. David Jepps, Employment Lawyer at Keystone Law comments: “Employers don’t legally have to provide any private healthcare for employees. Their key legal obligation is just to pay Statutory Sick Pay.” He adds: “However, as employers grow they need to recruit well and must compete with larger employers for the best staff. Private health insurance is a ‘given’ benefit with larger employers and a crucial factor in whether a prospective new hire says ‘yes’. There are also the obvious benefits helping employees get better more quickly and to have flexibility with medical appointments.”

Experienced and high quality employees often feel that they should, by rights, be offered a certain set of perks in their jobs. And heading the list of must-have benefits is health insurance. Many consider pension plans, disability insurance and a number of other benefits standard practise! But what are the legal obligations, benefits and potential issues involved?

Brian Palmer, Employment Lawyer at Keystone Law explains: “The only legal obligation upon employers with regard to employee sickness is to provide statutory sick pay, which is a set at a low rate of £88.45pw. Employers often offer more generous contractual sick pay terms. In addition, in the competition to attract staff, many employers also provide private medical insurance (PMI) as a benefit to employees. As NHS resources become increasingly stretched, research suggests that half of employees (50%) say they find PMI personally valuable, compared to 41% for occupational or workplace pensions. It is often more cost effective to buy PMI for a group rather than individually.

“As the cost of PMI to employers continues to increase, employees should check carefully any restrictions on the terms of PMI such as the amount of any excess payable, level of outpatient cover and freedom of choice of specialists. When moving to a new employer, employees should ensure that their new employer offers comparable cover and does not exclude any pre-existing conditions.”

We also spoke to Rachel Western, principal at Aon Employee Benefits, who gave us an overview of what workplace healthcare offers employees and employers, how employers can ensure they’re offering the right type of health insurance and and what the risks are if not enrolled in any schemes:

“There is no key regulation around the provision of medical insurance. Clients who want to ensure the health provision meets their workplace health requirements may have a wellness strategy that focuses on workplace health initiatives and ensure measurables exist to ensure it is meeting strategy objectives.

“It is useful for companies to establish what their employee health risks are and the short and long term implications of these risks and what solutions they can utilise to combat them. Whilst common themes can emerge, these risks will be different by client.”

“Health insurance in its own right does not provide a full strategy for managing workplace health as provision is rarely focused on workplace health issues but general medical issues also. We also find that workplace health issues impact other benefits and provisions and not just private medical insurance.”

Workplace healthcare is something that should be considered by every company, and with no one answer across the board, employers should take into account the type of work and their employees’ needs. However, it seems we have a way to go, as Rachel adds: “From Aon’s Benefit and Trends Survey 2015 we established that 38% of corporates do not use any analytics to inform or drive their corporate health and wellbeing strategy. Where data is harnessed, it is most likely to be via absence data (49%).”