Get the Perfect OH Service for your Business

Are you wondering if your occupational health service is fit for purpose? Are you finding different parts of the business have different practices? Or are you taking on a new contract and wondering if it delivers the type of service adequate for the health risks involved?

You may have misgivings about whether your occupational health service is doing what it should be, using evidence-based strategies or at least best practice? Is the current service providing value for money? Could it do more or less? Or maybe you don’t have any occupational health service at all, and think perhaps you should?

If these questions are troubling you, consider a review of your occupational health (OH) needs and service provision.

This article will take you through the steps to take to review your occupational health service provision, whether contracted out, in-house, or use various OH providers working in different areas/business units.

Size of Organisation

The type of review you choose for your occupational health services will depend on:

• The size of the organisation that you work in
• The geographical spread of your company and the contracts you work on
• How much control you have over contracts
• The health risks in the business or contracts
• Other considerations, such as type of service (for schools and hospitals say) and whether you deal with government contracts, as these are governed by statute

Occupational Health (OH)

It’s difficult for an OH service to review and audit themselves. The assessment is best done by an outsider with a more neutral perspective and no expectations or personal interest in the review outcome.

Unfortunately, few people outside of occupational health understand what OH services should do. Just to make sure we all understand this, occupational health’s primary work is preventing work related ill health. For more information, go to the HSE website on health surveillance here.

This says:

“Health surveillance allows for early identification of ill health and helps identify any corrective action needed. Health surveillance may be required by law if your employees are exposed to noise or vibration, solvents, fumes, dusts, biological agents and other substances hazardous to health, or work in compressed air.”

One way of testing understanding of OH matters within your own organisation, prior to a full OH review,  is to survey your managers that use occupational health, and gauge their responses and expectations.

Use Surveymonkey to set your own questions, such as:

• Is the current OH service meeting expectations?
• Is the service adding value to your department?
• Could managers have managed as well by using the individual’s GP?
• Did you understand the report that OH sent you?
• Was the response timely?
• Satisfaction scores
• How were problems resolved

It may be an opportunity to lead an internal workshop with some hand-picked individuals to examine the general level of awareness of OH issues. This is especially important where resources are tight or you’re operating on low margins. Health needs in the workplace must be based on facts that are evidence based or best practice and any health strategy must apply to your workers.

Limitations of the review

Competent reviewers should do the formal review, especially if the current OH service has been in place for years. Even if the general opinion is good about the OH service, it may not be doing what it should be.

I once reviewed an OH service where everyone in the company was absolutely thrilled by what the OH service did, hearing checks and lung function testing on everyone in the company, whether they worked in a hazardous area. Manager were worried about discrimination if they didn’t allow a health check  for everyone.

In fact, the company was wasting money by checking office workers who had no exposure to noise or dusts. “Ah”, you might say, “surely that is good not bad?”

But why is it good when the company is paying for unnecessary health checks – why not spend the money on buying quieter machinery or dust dampening process controls – that would make much more sense, and be proactive for those working in the hazardous environments?

The expertise needed for the review will also depend on the risks you have in your company. For example, nuclear and railways are high risk and covered by regulations that require a specialist doctor’s input; whereas administration and call centres are low risk, and may not require any health monitoring at all.

Also, if you have separate business units, the risk will vary according to the work.

One thing is clear, do not review your OH provision with those already working in your organisation, as they will have a pre-set idea of how an OH service should look. You will need a set of fresh eyes, maybe a new start, maybe a new model of delivery.

It’s important that the reviewer is not hampered by company politics or allegiances. In fact, if you choose somebody already in the organisation, you may waste your time and money, especially if they do not understand the professional and legal issues of occupational medicine.

Budget

A medical review is not cheap but can be worthwhile and cost saving money in the long term. Services may be streamlined, improved, and even extended if there are health risks being ignored by current provisions. Legal costs for poor management can be high. More importantly, individuals can suffer long-term health problems because of the work. A bespoke, relevant OH service provision can mitigate these costs and outcomes.

Costs for the review can be set by you and this will become part of the offer to the reviewer. Maybe you want to cut the cost of the OH service, so you need to focus on what is essential, e.g. what do you legally need to provide?

Review/Audit Process

Set your priorities for review depending on your available budget and needs, for example:

• Do you need to do health surveillance – is it a priority? Are you handling dangerous chemicals or need statutory medicals?
• Well-being programmes, are they cost effective and relevant to most of the workforce?
• Health screening – do you have safety critical workers or drivers
• Pre-Placement health screening – do you have the right people doing the right job?
• Are you losing money through high absence levels?

Or what about a preliminary internal company review by doing:

• A strategic SWOT or gap analysis
• Where do you want to be in 5 years and how to get there
• What “good” occupational health provision would look like in your company
• Can occupational health be delivered more cost effectively or cheaper? What options do you have?

Next steps

So you’ve been through all the preliminary steps of deciding that your occupational health service needs a review. What do you do next?

You really have two choices:

SEQOHS (Safe Effective Quality Occupational Health Services)

SEQOHS (said see-qoss) is an accreditation scheme for occupational health service providers and is recommended by the UK government to ensure consistency and compliance in occupational health service provision. It’s supported by the Faculty of Occupational Medicine. The SEQOHS site contains a list of all the accredited OH services in the UK. This service is usually chosen by large corporations and those involved with government contracts.

Another Service/Individual

There are other professional lists where you can find suitably competent individuals to undertake a review, e.g. OSCHR, BOHS services or perhaps from word of mouth. You will need to check out qualifications for this type of review and make sure it applies to your service. These are more relevant for small to medium-sized enterprises.

Who to Choose

Choose 3 – 5 OH service reviewers from the lists on the two sites above, bearing in mind the process you will follow and size of your company.

Consider telephoning each OH reviewer for a preliminary discussion, setting out what you are looking for and whether they have the expertise, resources and inclination to be invited to tender, you may pick up some hints on how to be more specific in the actual invitation to tender document.

When you have your preferred bidders send the tender document to them or follow legal guidelines if applicable^[1].

The process

The process of review of OH services will contain important steps usually:

• The objectives of the review (cut costs, evidence based, better delivery etc)
• The timeframes for delivery
• Signposts for delivery, what is delivered when and how
• Recommendations with costing
• Staffing levels for any new service
• Model of delivery e.g. in-house service, contracted services, hybrid model
• Projections for future service
• Terms and conditions for payment
• Attendance on site days for workshops, interviews, presentations, etc

Specify a date when the tenders should be returned and the option to ask questions if anything is unclear (answers will be sent to all potential bidders). This ensures transparency and gets you the best process for choosing the OH reviewer.

If you have a procurement team, then they will advise your company on the way to do this or best practice for your company.

Coordinator

If you’re having a thorough review and the reviewer requests interviews with  specific people, you will need a liaison or coordinator for the review, for example, to book rooms, setting up interviews, checking on progress and trouble-shooting.

Again, procurement usually takes this role in large companies.

Co-operation and priority for the review is important. This type of project can easily get put on the “I’ll do it later pile”; so an email from senior management or, even better, the Chief Executive will work wonders for co-operation of busy managers. Without managers input, the final recommendations may be academic rather than meaningful, and resources wasted.

The email from the CEO will also show the importance of the subject and help with the recommendations after…

Review of tenders

When the completed tenders are received, they’ll need reviewing scientifically, that is, more quantitative (scoring) than qualitative (personal feeling), because of the misconceptions about how OH should be delivered. This is where a workshop prior to the actual review can be helpful. A system of points for elements of service can be agreed early on for scoring the bids. For many companies now, managers must justify why and how they chose a certain service; fairness and transparency are key issues.

I know this will vary from company to company, but I have mostly used five categories of scoring:

1. Has met none of the objectives
2. Met some of the objectives
3. Met all objectives
4. Over delivered on objectives
5. Gone beyond the objectives and aims to deliver a comprehensive response

Also considered is the cost, or cost savings, of each recommendation made. Companies will have their own view of how cost (quality versus quantity) impacts on awarding contracts. Many go with the lowest price. But that is not always the best way forward for health services and one would look at the quality of the processes described too (e.g. response time, reports, IT services, economies of scale, facilities) for a full picture.

You need to decide what is important to you, your workers and your work, when scoring the responses.

The higher the score on each objective the better the answer.  Adding up the scores will give a comparator, and bids can be ranked in order of acceptability to you.

Scoring The Tenders

For best results, it’s important that there are several reviewers of tenders and that they work independently of each other. Remember, the loudest voice or the most senior manager may not have much insight into OH services. And it’s sometimes difficult to argue against these.

Each reviewer takes away a scoring card and sets a score using their professional skills against each aim. Hopefully, everyone will come to the same conclusion and there will be an outright winner. However, with health, it is difficult to achieve; people have different expectations of what is appropriate in terms of occupational health provision in the workplace.

This is where the importance of an initial workshop comes into play, making sure everyone understands what occupational health is all about. And this serves several purposes; not only does it give scorers and stakeholders tools to critically analyse the tenders, but it also improves the overall understanding of occupational health and influences good OH in the company in the future. For example, many believe occupational health is about health and well-being (checking blood pressures and measuring cholesterol, for example); but it’s not really. So it’s important that this is described as non-essential occupational health work, and already available on the NHS. Without understanding of OH in the workplace, the scoring could be skewed and irrelevant.

Decision

If there are two or even three bidders who are close in terms of quality and price, ask these to present their findings to key stakeholders before making a final decision.

The winning tender bid will be asked to go ahead with the OH review/investigation.

The Review/Investigation

To get a full picture of what’s happening across the whole company (and especially in multi-national and cost centred companies) try any or all of the following:

• Workshops where occupational health services, and requirements are discussed and analysed. The first part of the workshop needs to explore what OH is so that the outcome is realistic, and people understand what occupational health is before making recommendations. The second part would be based on your company’s needs and requirements
• A list of key stakeholders (important people) in the company for interview, and could include
  • Managers
  • Directors
  • Finance
  • HR
  • Safety
  • The current occupational health provider
  • Trade unions
• Health risk profile of work undertaken
• Relevant health legislation to your work, e.g. COSHH. Asbestos, Noise
• Site visits
• Review of current services, quality and costs
• Review of policies and procedures
• Review of integration
• How OH is co-ordinated and consistency across the business
• Value for money
• History of occupational disease, absence, accidents and incidents linked to health – prioritise what is most important in your company

Results from the Review

The final report should contain the information you require and have an executive summary setting out at least 3 options for your OH provision:

1. The “do nothing” option (leave things as they are) – pros and cons
2. Preferred option and why this is the best way forward for your company
3. An option (or options) that addresses the pros and cons of issues arising in 1 and 2 above, or considers another approach entirely

Conclusion

From the final OH review, with recommendations and options, you will decide if your current occupational health service fits your needs or whether you need to rethink and reorganise. And, most importantly, from the workshops, interviews and the process itself, you will have increased awareness and understanding of occupational health issues in your company.

^[1] The outline of procurement for Government projects: click here

If you want more advice and insights into OH – read the Manager’s Guide to Health and Wellbeing at Work