Workforce Health
As we manage the ongoing effects of a generation-defining pandemic, and face a crisis in the cost of living, the health and resilience of the UK workforce and society more widely is of central importance. The evidence is fast accumulating on the link between health and wealth, and how economic growth cannot ignore the health of the population.
Business for Health (B4H) joined forces with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to host a Think Tank at the MADWorld Summit in October 2023 inviting senior policymakers, industry leaders, technology pioneers and public sector innovators to explore the levers with most impact for business and policy innovation to address workforce inactivity and long-term sickness, particularly in the +50 population. The recommendations are set out in the report Rebooting the Nation’s Health Through the Workplace launched at the UKRI-hosted event during Longevity Week in November 2023.
The report will inform B4H’s work for the NIHR Work and Health Development Award involving a consortium of 15 organisations initiated in October 2023. The research programme is geared to address the complex issues presented by the rising number of people leaving the workforce due to ill health is a local and national priority. Our ambition is to understand the diversity of health intervention pathways in order to deliver integrated and resilient care by investing in workforce health sustainably, as part of a system change approach across the three pillars of the Business Framework for Health (workforce health, consumer health- including diet/food- and community health- including role of supermarkets in the community to shape positive health behaviors and practices, such as health checks announced recently by government).
In April 2023, with the support of Dame Carol Black, we launched the report, Business Framework for Health: A ‘Year On’: Progress since 2021. Supporting Employers, Businesses and Investors to Enhance and Level Up Health of the Nation (which can be accessed here) that reported on achievements of our research programme supported by the Health Foundation. In this report we set out our routemap for 2023-2025 including a programme of work to bring 'Health' into ESG.
We launched the Work Health Index at the CBI conference on 22 November 2022 with a keynote by Amanda Pritchard, CEO of NHS (click here to access the tool). Supported by NHS and Government, this tool, representing the first pillar of the three-pillar business framework for health, aims to help companies benchmark their health and wellbeing provision to their workforce, ultimately aiming to improve health and wellbeing outcomes to help reduce labour force inactivity and tackle record long-term sickness absence levels restricting the UK’s productivity and undermining economic growth ambitions.
Business for Health launched its first report, Business Framework for Health: Supporting Businesses and Employers in their Role to Enhance and Level Up Health of the Nation, in collaboration withn the CBI on 18 October 2021.
Working Group
We are delighted the following experts are helping the Business for Health team (see here) with the design of the Business Framework for Health.
Andrew J Scott
Andrew is Professor of Economics at London Business School having previously held positions at Oxford University, London School of Economics and Harvard University. His work focuses on the economics of longevity and he is the co-author of “The 100 Year Life” and “The New Long Life”. He was Managing Editor for the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal and Non-Executive Director for the UK’s Financial Services Authority 2009-2013. He is currently on the advisory board of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the Cabinet Office Honours Committee (Science and Technology), co-founder of The Longevity Forum, a member of the WEF council on Healthy Ageing and Longevity and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. Andrew is also the recipient of an ESRC grant for researching the economic longevity dividend.
Pamela Gellatly
Pamela has worked in healthcare for more than 35 years. She has an MSc in Occupational Safety and Health and an MSc in Exercise and Nutrition. Pamela also has a PhD in the underlying cause and contributory risk factors associated with musculoskeletal disorders in the workplace, including the psychosocial factors and the links with stress, anxiety and depression. Pamela has developed an integrated approach to employee health risk management which straddles safety, health and wellbeing, which provides her with unique access to rich quantitative and qualitative data not commonly available. It is this data which has driven her research which now closely aligns with the global understanding of the importance of personal risk factors.
Rupert Dunbar-Rees
Rupert is Founder & CEO of Outcomes Based Healthcare (OBH), and a GP by background. OBH is a leading UK health data analytics organisation providing outcomes and population segmentation insights to integrated care systems, providers and payors nationally and internationally. OBH specialise in measuring population-level Healthy Lifespan ('Healthspan'), and capitated health expenditure, using linked longitudinal health and care data. In 2016, Rupert was selected as one of eight NHS Innovation Fellows by NHS England. Rupert trained in Medicine at Imperial College, gaining a degree in Orthopaedics from University College London. He was a hospital doctor, and then Partner in general practice for five years, before joining the Department of Health for three years as a specialist clinical advisor.
Yvonne Sonsino
Yvonne is Partner and Global Co-Leader of ‘Next Stage’ at Mercer. Her current focus is on the organisational implications of macro trends such as increasing longevity, 4IR future of work scenarios and sustaining a truly inclusive workforce. Mercer’s Next Stage platform examines the coalescence of living and working longer, and how organisations can harness the longevity dividend as we move into an increasingly digital age. Multigenerational fairness plays a big part here. Yvonne co-chaired the UK Govt. Department for Work and Pensions Fuller Working Lives Business Strategy Group, working with employers to recruit, retain and retrain older workers, which published its policy document in 2017. Her first book, The New Rules of Living Longer, was published in November 2015, with a foreword from the UK Pensions Minister. She is an advisor to the Healthy Ageing challenge fund and currently working on a global dialogue series called ‘Redesigning Retirement for the 100 year life’ with the World Economic Forum.
Les Mayhew
Les is Professor of Statistics at The Business School, City University, London in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance, and Managing Director of Mayhew Harper Associates Ltd. He is a former senior civil servant with nearly 20 years of experience in the Department of Health and Social Security, Department of Social Security, HM Treasury and Office for National Statistics, where he was also a director. He was an Associate Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Vienna, for many years, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. In 2020 took up the post as head of global research at ILC-UK which is the UK’s specialist think tank on the impact of longevity on society, and what happens next. He specialises in demographic ageing, health and social care, pensions and now housing. In 2004, he co-authored a book entitled the ‘Economic Impacts of Population Ageing in Japan’ and in 2010 wrote a commissioned report for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit entitled ‘The Economic Value of Healthy Ageing and Working Longer’.
Jess Attard
Jess is currently leading ShareAction’s work on health and healthy diets, developing this as a new and important ESG topic. This is on the backdrop of the pandemic which has shown how clearly economic prosperity is dependent upon good population health. ShareAction is a responsible investment charity working toward an investment system which supports healthier people and planet. Jess is seconded from Impact on Urban Health which aims to tackle health inequalities by helping urban areas become healthier places to live. Here, she funded and oversaw a £5m+ portfolio with the primary aim of improving food environments by engaging with their commercial determinants. Through this work, Jess has taken a Non-executive Director position at SmashCo – an early stage tech start-up partnering with world-leading brands to offer young people healthier alternatives at a discounted price.
Greg Ceely
Greg is head of the Health Index and Projections team in the Office for National Statistics. A member of the Government Statistical Service, his career in government has spanned multiple departments, consistently focussed on operationalising and modelling complex issues to influence health policy. Greg leads development of the Health Index, a tool for tracking the nation’s health and determinants of health over time. The beta version of this statistic was published in December 2020, and his team in ONS are using public consultation feedback to progress the Health Index’s development out of beta stage and into widespread use – including, hopefully, within policy appraisal frameworks. Prior to his time in ONS, Greg has worked in the Department for Work and Pensions building PENFORM, the first forecasting model estimating the cost of the State Pension changes legislated in 2014.
Carol Brayne
Carol is a Professor of Public Health Medicine and Co-Chair of Cambridge Public Health Interdisciplinary Centre at the University of Cambridge. She is a medically qualified epidemiologist and public health academic. Her main research has been longitudinal studies of older people following changes over time with a public health perspective and focus on the brain. Her leadership roles have included representation of the academic public health community nationally, regionally and locally to promote sustained embedding of evidence generation and implementation. She is Population Health Special Adviser to the President of the Royal College of Physicians and chairs its Inequalities Advisory Group. She has played a lead role in teaching and training in epidemiology and public health at Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an NIHR Senior Investigator Emeritus.
Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard
Dr Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard is NHS Consultant, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust; Honorary Consultant, Public Health Medicine, Imperial College Healthcare NHS TRust; Head of Health Analytics at Lane Clark & Peacock; Vice Chair of the Royal Society for Public Health.
Jonny was Editor-in-Chief of the Chief Medical Officer's 2018 Report 'Health 2040; Better Health Within Reach’ which recommended the development of a composite Health Index.
Jonny trained at Oxford and Imperial College and has been awarded multiple competitive clinical-academic research positions from the NIHR and the Wellcome Trust. His research has two main streams spanning non-communicable disease epidemiology. First, using big data and simulation modelling of health, economic and inequality outcomes to inform public health policy. Second, he investigates the increasing multimorbidity and diversification of outcomes in patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes. His work at LCP focuses on cutting through the noise of complex datasets to put actionable insights into the hands of decision makers across health and life sciences
Annabel Bentley
Dr Annabel Bentley is Chief Medical Officer for AXA Health. Her mission is reducing serious avoidable harm to patients. She is responsible for medical policy and strategy, leading a team of doctors, nurses, and advisers. Her interests are new technologies and the use of data, analytics and AI to improve care and reduce fraud, waste and abuse for the benefit of customers.
Dr Bentley worked in then NHS for four years, trained as a surgeon after qualifying from Kings College University of London. She’s held senior executive roles in independent healthcare organisations including private medical insurance, a diagnostics provider and a tech start up. She is a Responsible Officer, has a postgraduate diploma in Evidence Based Healthcare from the University of Oxford and has been a guest lecturer at St George’s Medical School Department of Primary Care.
Ben Franklin
Ben is Head of Research at the Centre for Progressive Policy, leading the development of the Centre’s original research programme. Before this, Ben was Assistant Director of Research and Policy at the International Longevity Centre, exploring the economic implications of demographic change. Ben has also undertaken economic analysis for the Financial Conduct Authority, and has worked in research and policy for the Chartered Insurance Institute and HM Treasury.
Connor Rochford
Connor is a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Rachel Melsom
Dr Rachel Melsom is a physician at Worthing Hospital, University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, focused on Care of the Elderly; the Founder of Medical Matrix Consulting Ltd. Rachel is focused on aiding and encouraging the finance sector to actively review their fund allocation and frameworks in light of the financial, societal and health impacts and externalities of their investments. Dr Melsom has recently joined Intelligent Lilli as Chief Medical Officer. Lilli delivers discrete remote technology enabled care, helping to reduce hospital admissions, improve care provision metrics and quality of life by enabling independence. She has stepped back from her role as Director, UK & Europe, Tobacco Free Portfolios. The Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge has, since launch in 2018, been signed by global financial organisations representing over $14tn in assets under management and corporate loan book.
Sir Michael Marmot
Sir Michael Marmot has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985. He is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General, on social determinants of health, in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-), and co-Director of the of the CUHK Institute of Health Equity. At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, which published its report 'Fair Society, Healthy Lives' in February 2010. This was followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide, for WHO EURO in 2014; Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On, in 2020; Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot Review in 2021; and the Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, for WHO EMRO, also in 2021.
Dr Jessica Allen
Dr Jessica Allen is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Health Equity at UCL. Jessica’s main activities are in working to embed a social determinants approach to health inequalities in England and globally. She led work on the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (published March 2021), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Commission on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas and the Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide in the WHO European Region. She was previously Project Director of the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post-2010 (the Marmot Review) and in February 2020, co-authored the Marmot Review 10 Years On report and in December 2020 led work on Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot review.
Dr Bola Owolabi
Dr Bola Owolabi MB BS DFFP MRCGP MSc is Director – Health Inequalities at NHS England and NHS Improvement. She works as a General Practitioner in the Midlands. Bola has particular interests in reducing health inequalities through Integrated Care Models, Service Transformation and using data & insights for Quality Improvement. Bola has held various leadership roles at local, system and national levels. She was until recently, National Specialty Advisor for Older People and Integrated Person Centred-Care at NHS England and Improvement where she led the Anticipatory Care Workstream of the National Ageing Well Programme. She has worked with teams across NHS England/Improvement and the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the Covid 19 Pandemic response.