Health and Wellbeing at Work Report 2023

28 September 2023

How we can apply learnings from other sectors into practices 

By Catherine Rutland, Clinical Director at Denplan

The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), supported by Simplyhealth, recently published its Health and Wellbeing at Work Report.

This report has been running annually for the last 23 years and is a great reference for how employers are working to support their staff and looking at the changes that have occurred over that period.

Shockingly the report revealed that despite an uptake in health and wellbeing strategies from employers, the rate of absence is at an all-time high. It also showed that like Dentistry, recruitment and retention is a big challenge across sectors, but provides insight into where other employers are working to create a healthy  workforce -an important learning for us all.

Of course, I fully appreciate as a past practice owner, that in small businesses it can be more challenging to set up health and wellbeing initiatives, without a dedicated team and restraints of budget. However, our teams are arguably our biggest asset and considering how we can further look to support their health and wellbeing is so important.

This year, the headline statistic has been the increase in average sick days, rising from 5.8 per employee per year in 2019, to 7.8 this year. As a team where chaperones and support are necessary to be able to look after our patients, this rise is concerning, and I know staff absence is something many of you have told me has been a challenge over the last few years.

Mental health remains the most common focus of employers’ wellbeing activity. Alongside this, sits work around the values and principles of a company, how we work from a collective and social responsibility perspective as well as work-life balance, physical health and personal growth. Many of these areas I know are really important to practices and their teams.

As far as challenges are concerned the main challenge that is shown in the report is lack of manager skills and confidence to support wellbeing. This is something that we need to consider, how do we as leaders make sure we and the relevant people in our teams, whether practice managers or wellbeing leads, develop our skills, confidence and resources to be able to really support our teams and that they trust us to be able to do so. The report also highlights the importance of leaders giving priority to wellbeing and I would hope, leading by example.

We must also be mindful of the different support an employee may require through their practice lifecycle and make sure we do not expect a ‘one size fits all’ approach to work!

The health and wellbeing of our teams is central to all we do and having an understanding of the wider employment landscape gives us an opportunity to reflect on whether we could do anything better for our teams.