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CGF ARTICLES, OPINIONS & EDITORIALS

Employee wellness is a bottom-line business issue (2014-04-10)

Article by Dr Dicky Els and George Marx

The healthcare of South Africans in the workplace should be one of the top priorities of employers; but evidence across many industries reflects a dire situation which suggests employers do not have employee’s wellness top of mind. 
The backbone of employees’ wellness borders on the disastrous, and this is exacerbated through the huge failure of service delivery in the public sector and the unaffordability of medical schemes to the bulk of the employed population. Despite this burning platform, the government’s plan to reform healthcare through the National Health Insurance (NHI) -- although highly commendable -- also raises concern because it may not roll out in the foreseeable future on a national level.

In the meantime medical scheme contribution rates are continuously raising the bar for employers and their employees. The 2012-2013 Annual Report of the Council for Medical Schemes reveals that medical schemes have an average annual increase rate of four percentage points more than the national inflation rate of 5.90% (as measured by the Consumer Price Index). Simply put, employees must expect an average of 10% increase in their medical scheme contributions each year.  In real terms, given the down-turned economy, employees are generally getting less medical benefits as they are unable to keep abreast with the rising medical scheme contributions. When medical scheme contributions continue to exceed inflation rates, and whilst employee salary increases are also below this threshold, there’s no denying that circumstances such as these become unsustainable with negative implications upon business practices.  Expectedly, in response to the escalating medical scheme contributions, employees tend to downgrade their medical scheme benefits to lower options, whilst forking out more and more healthcare expenses from their own pockets.  For employers, the increase of healthcare costs -- combined with high levels of labour unrest, absenteeism, including non-communicable diseases and disability claims -- is a relentless burden and is becoming increasingly more difficult to manage.  Moreover, statistics surrounding unhealthy behaviour and morbidity (illness and disease) is rocketing.

The recently released SA National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that South Africans suffer from a quadruple burden of disease: from HIV and AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB), high levels of maternal and child mortality, intentional and non-intentional injuries and non-communicable diseases.  Non-communicable conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, mental disorders, oral and eye diseases and muscular skeletal disorders contribute to a significant level of employee absence and morbidity.  However more than half of South Africans who have these health risk conditions are undiagnosed and do not receive any primary health care or treatment. Clearly, the outcome of this deteriorating health status of employees (and their families) places greater burdens upon their employer organisations to remain productive and sustainable, and it worsens as more employees struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to afford the care they need.  Expectedly employers must take some of the responsibility, especially where the working environment and conditions exacerbate the employees’ ability to promote their overall health and wellness.
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