Carol Black gives first clues on health review's recommendations

News | HSP
06.03.2008

Occupational health guidance for small businesses, training for GPs on the link between work and rehabilitation, and encouragement for employers to recognise the critical role of line managers in reducing long-term sickness absence are likely to be among the key recommendations of Professor Dame Carol Black's much anticipated review of the health of the working-age population.

Black, who was appointed to carry out the review by the secretary of state for work and pensions last year, gave the first signs of the shape of its conclusions, expected out this month, in an address to the Health, Work and Wellbeing conference in Birmingham on 6 March.

She described the results of her six months' work as "a high level report", confirming there will be "no section on any particular chronic condition or age group" but that all the findings would be applicable to the whole working-age population.

"We have tried not to over-medicalise it," she said, adding there will be recommended actions for government, employers and the medical profession as "no one stakeholder can take us there".

She said the report would provide a clear snapshot of the health of the UK's working population which could serve as a "baseline" against which to judge the success of future initiatives. Its other function would be to recommend some of those initiatives in a bid to reduce the burden of sickness absence for employers, workers and the government.

One priority, she said, is to raise the level of understanding among GPs of the rehabilitative value of work and the detriment to many of their patients of repeatedly signing them off for months at a time.

She said a programme of half-day workshops for GPs on including questions about work in their consultations, trialled by the Royal College of General Practitioners last year, would be rolled out across the country. She hinted that there might also be recommendations about the inclusion of occupational health capabilities in the NHS.

SMEs' lack of health provision was one of the main challenges highlighted by the review's research, said Black, noting that SMEs could make a big difference to employee health and rehabilitation through small, inexpensive interventions.

"They don't need the whole gamut of occupational health interventions," she said.

Black confirmed her report will include research commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers involving 50 case studies of UK businesses. The studies show the return on investment of health interventions. "We needed to show the cost/benefit if we are to encourage action in others," she explained.

Black said she believed that the report would be published before the end of March and that she hoped the government would act on its recommendations.