Understanding Occupational Health Provision 2023-24
This research provides an overview of the current structure of the occupational health (OH) market, along with the attitudes and behaviours of OH Providers.
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Details
This research was conducted with occupational health (OH) providers headquartered in Great Britain. It was commissioned to gain insight into the way the OH market operates, as well as barriers and challenges the market faces.
The research aim was to provide new baseline information on the OH market to monitor changes over time, as well as offer new evidence to support the development of future OH policies.
Contribution to the Evidence Base
This research provides updated findings from the previous survey on OH provision conducted in 2019.
Research Value
The insight gathered from this research will support the development of future government policy. There are several key areas whereby gaining more information on OH providers will be critical to designing policy that has maximum impact and for measuring outcomes over time. These include:
- Testing our assumptions about OH market failures, e.g. the OH sector is heavily reliant on NHS-trained OH doctors and nurses, but their numbers are declining. The promotion of both OH as a career and using multi-disciplinary teams could mitigate further reductions in workforce. Testing these assumptions will ensure any potential policy interventions are appropriate in targeting the market failures.
- Identifying where OH workforce shortages exist, how OH providers are addressing them, and where they see a need for support, to ensure that potential policy interventions for the declining OH workforce are both efficient and effective.
- Understanding the extent of, barriers to, and enablers for, providers using less clinical and more multi-disciplinary teams.
- Collecting data on the pricing of OH services to a) more accurately estimate the cost of OH policies and b) analyse the costs and benefits of OH services.
- Providing new baseline information on the OH market to enable monitoring of changes over time.