Corporate health: Helping employers provide healthier, safer work environments and reducing levels of absenteeism is the aim of a dedicated occupational health centre opened by the VHI last week.
Located at the Waverley Business Park on the Old Naas Road, the VHI Corporate Solutions Centre offers a range of services to corporate clients delivered by 20 occupational health professionals.
"With an average of 7.8 days lost per employee per annum in Ireland, it's clear that investment in the well-being and safety of employees should not be seen as an optional luxury but as a prerequisite to achieving a healthy bottom line," Brendan Quinn, general manager of Corporate Solutions, explained.
Absence due to sickness cost Irish business €112 million in 2002 and the final figure for 2003 was expected to exceed 120 million, he added.
"The cost of ill health and absence is a key concern for business who come to us. One Irish company estimated that in their business, 1 per cent of absenteeism costs 150,000. We are here to provide services to put the best programmes in place to reduce those figures."
Services provided by VHI Corporate Solutions include pre-employment medicals, vaccination programmes, absence management reviews, incident and accident overviews and health surveillance testing such as VDU eye screening, audiometry and spirometry.
A cycle of training courses will be provided on a monthly basis on topics such as manual handling techniques, occupational first aid and safety representative courses. Nutrition and stress management courses are also provided, and are aimed at increasing employee awareness of stress and teaching stress management skills.
Employee assistance programmes offer employees a comprehensive and confidential service with 24-hour, 365-days-a-year access to telephone counselling combined with face-to-face counselling.
Officially launching the facility last Thursday, Bernard Collins, chairman of VHI, said that through the company's close relationship with over 8,000 companies, it quickly recognised the need for Irish companies to focus on the health of their employees in a more "proactive way".
"As a result, we developed VHI Corporate Solutions offering a choice of cost-efficient services designed to help employers provide a healthier, safer work environment."
For two years the company has been providing such services on site to over 150 companies and 10,000 employees nationwide. These companies range in size from 20 to over 3,500 employees. The new facility enables companies to send people off site for treatment. "Traditionally we worked with larger companies because they were able to take us on site for a day or two at a time but now smaller companies, which have only five or six people in need of a special test, can send them to our centre.
"Research has shown that companies using an employee assistance programme have shown a reduction in sickness absence levels of up to 2.4 days per employee," Mr Collins said.
BUPA offers an occupational health service called Health@Work, which offers tailormade programmes to companies as well as providing on-site occupational health nurses on a contract basis.