Abstract
AbstractIll-health currently keeps a quarter of the UK’s working age population out of employment, at a significant social and economic cost to both those individuals and the country as a whole. It is, therefore, essential that healthcare and business professionals have sufficient skills to manage the physical and mental health of their teams and support individuals to re-enter employment. This study looked at the extent to which six core health and work topics were included in the curricula and assessment of healthcare and business degree courses. It included a quantitative review of 221 healthcare and business degree programmes in England. This was supplemented with secondary analysis of existing literature on health and work education and qualitative interviews with course leaders in 38 universities. The study found that across all healthcare and business courses, there was relatively little explicit coverage of health and work topics in course curricula or assessment. When health and work was covered,...
Highlights
There is a compelling need to reduce rates of sickness absence and health-related worklessness in the UK
This study looked at the extent to which six core health and work topics were included in the curricula and assessment of healthcare and business degree courses
Where health and work was covered, most courses only included one health and work topic, and in some cases only a small component of a health and work topic. This is largely in-line with the findings from Boon Ridd and Blythe (2017), Gillam and Bagade (2006) and Grant et al (2015). It suggests that current provision is unlikely to provide the step-change necessary to improve addressing the gaps in healthcare and business professionals knowledge of health and work, as cited by PricewaterhouseCoopers (2008) and Hann and Sibbald (2011)
Summary
There is evidence that healthier workplaces can help reduce rates of sickness-related absenteeism as well as raising staff productivity This requires leaders and managers to have effective skills to support the health and well-being of employees, and healthcare professionals to have skills in both supporting patients with workplace-related mental and physical health issues and managing the workplace mental and physical health needs of the teams they manage. It requires better employer self-management of health in the workplace, though professionals’ developing these skills in their course and if managers were encouraged to consider health in their people management strategies. The most notable was Boon, Ridd and Blythe’s (2017) study of medicine courses’ taught content on primary care, which found only six of 30 courses addressed work and health in the course aims and objectives
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