Workshop 2: May 2010

The second ‘Diabetes in the workplace’ workshop was held on 5 May 2010, a follow-up to the earlier event held in February 2010 (click here >>). Both events were chaired by Dame Carol Black, National Director of Health and Work and Christine Hancock. The aims of the second event were to build on the previous workshop, to hear from Diabetes UK on the role of voluntary organisations, and to share ideas among the five workplaces represented: Caterpillar, Unilever, Royal Mail, Heart of England NHS Trust and Diabetes UK.

The conclusions of the meeting will be taken to the Coalition for Better Health, an organisation created by the government to bring together the commercial and public sectors and NGOs to address obesity.

Points of discussion

Screening

• Screening is very empowering – and Unilever is seeing a reduction in absenteeism.
• Caterpillar is screening employees at 35, 40, 45, 48, 50 and then annually (so-called ‘birthday medicals’). Take-up has been about 40% (it costs about £30pp).
• There is, however, a difference between screening/lifestyle issues for the whole employee population, and focusing programmes on people with chronic disorders who want to stay at work.

Challenges to voluntary organisations of scale and funding

• There are a vast number of employers in this country compared to the number of staff/volunteers of organisations such as Diabetes UK that could help with designing health programmes, making it essential to have scalable, practical projects.
• It is hard to identify the appropriate role for voluntary and state sector – the voluntary organisation can help to innovate and identify best practice, but cannot solve the nation’s problems. It therefore needs to be properly joined-up with the rest of the system, such as PCTs.
• One way to overcome the scaling problem could be to get the intellectual property from the experts, and then cascade this information using existing communication tools within companies.

Confidentiality worries:

• Within companies, many employees will inevitably be concerned about where their information goes, leading them to withdraw from health programmes. Hence, the ‘distance’ of information from the employer is important.
• One way around this is to use private health insurance (such as PruHealth’s Vitality programme), which may be perceived as being external to the company, and therefore more secure.

A general or diabetes-specific agenda?

• It is unrealistic to expect SMEs, or middle managers in a larger company, to get to grips with all the different disease issues independently of one another, so perhaps there should be an integrated, general approach, rather than purely diabetes-specific programmes.
• However, there is a practical problem, as the voluntary sector can help to train employers (e.g. Diabetes UK could run courses on diabetes), but there is no consortium of charities working together to train on all the different diseases together.
• The group felt that it would be useful to be able to access information and best-practice examples on resolving problems at work related to diabetes, so that they can be used as exemplars.
• Change4Life materials are both robust and recognised, and could be used and targeted on diabetes.