When creating its healthcare strategy, Wellcome Trust established a clear objective to provide a comprehensive healthcare scheme that was also sustainable for the future.
The global charitable foundation, which is based in the UK and has 1,000 employees, uses science to solve urgent health challenges as part of its mission to create a healthier future for everyone.
It wanted to ensure that its benefits were appropriate for staff, focus on clear pathways to access support and provide consistency of care. It looked at all of its healthcare benefits for any gaps or areas of overlap to create simple and easy-to-access offerings. Provider data, areas of high usage and survey feedback helped to ensure the provision was appropriate for staff needs.
Fraser Liu, benefits advisor at the Wellcome Trust, explains that it wanted to refine its benefits in terms of changes and enhancements to preventative primary and secondary care, and create clear pathways for the most commonly claimed for conditions.
“We reviewed access to physiotherapy and musculoskeletal treatments within our WPA-provided private medical insurance (PMI) scheme and we stitched that together with an internal injury consultation service,” he says. ”Employees don’t necessarily need to make a claim immediately on their PMI membership and can get an assessment prior to it. We streamlined our healthcare framework to make the employee journey as simple as possible, and we switched providers where we felt there was a better fit for our healthcare strategy.”
Wellcome Trust also wanted to remove barriers to treatment and have no need for a GP referral prior to making a claim. In the next month or two, it will introduce an onsite health checkup to complement its employer-funded health screening benefit, which all staff are currently eligible for. Furthermore, it consolidated an employee assistance programme, an app for mental health support and an online therapy provider into one new provider to replace the three previous separate ones in July.
This consolidation followed survey feedback, with staff feeling the trust’s healthcare offering was confusing, complicated and too much, explains Trudi Tibbatts, associate director of reward and wellbeing.
“Employee feedback is important,” she says. ”We looked at benefits providers’ management reports to see what staff’s key health concerns were and offer different options within the healthcare strategy to suit these. We also use our staff pulse survey, enabling the opportunity for them to add thoughts so it’s not just a scoring system, as well as health screening data and feedback from staff in passing.”
The trust intends to keep an eye on its new benefit launches and referrals, and monitor usage. It hopes to see increased scores and outcomes as a result of the changes.
Throughout the development of its new strategy, which came into effect in July, the trust worked with its internal communications team to develop a comprehensive communications plan. It used several methods, such as posters, breakout areas, and messaging on its intranet.
Tibbatts says: “We also had manager training, general communication sessions and held a small internal event where we invited our providers along so people could ask questions. We have an annual benefits fair each year, called Benefest, which allows staff to connect with providers face to face. It has good engagement and feedback; it’s one of our main benefit drivers.”
