EXCLUSIVE: Punter Southall Health and Protection Consulting (PSHPC) has launched an absence management service.
Healthsmart integrates occupational health, absence management and employee benefits, to help employers get employees back to work as quickly as possible, improve productivity and cut costs.
The service, which has been launched to complement the government’s incoming Health and Work Service, offers three tiers of service and benefits: Healthbase, Healthmonitor and Healthtrend.
Organisations that use Healthmonitor and Healthtrend share their absence data with PSHPC each month and cases are reviewed individually to help staff back to work as quickly as possible.
Healthbase is an ad-hoc service that organisations can use as needed.
The service also:
- Uses defined referral triggers and pro-active processes that manage both short and long-term absence.
- Provides employees with timely access to support and medical services through a combination of occupational health and benefit activation.
- Minimises work-related illness and injury by providing employees with medical assessments, recommendations and positive mentoring.
Beate O’Neil (pictured), head of wellness consulting at PSHPC, said: “A key challenge for employers will be deciding how to integrate the Health and Work Service with their existing occupational health and employee benefits provision.
“Employers are also concerned that the Health and Work Service will not know enough about their business to pull together return-to-work plans that are effective for both the employee and the organisations.
“So, larger employers, those with safety critical or specialist employees or employers that want to pro-actively manage absence and return-to-work plans, will be unlikely to rely on it for their absence solutions.
“PSHPC’s Healthsmart knows which support mechanisms to deploy and when, and this can make a significant difference to an employer and its employees.
“Initiating rehabilitation services through income protection helps an employee return to work quickly after an accident and at no extra cost to the employer.
“In addition, as the employee has not been categorised as long-term sick, this helps the organisation avoid increased annual premium costs for its income protection policy.”
