Procurement of Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing Providers

This week, I'm going to be talking about the procurement of health, mental health and well being providers. And what I mean by this is everything from health insurance and occupational health down to an app.

There's a lot of mental health apps that are coming on the market. Now, even through to having speakers coming into your organisation.

I'll be covering this topic over in different ways over the months to come, because there are so many different angles to it. And I think it is a great source of confusion for lots of organisations.

Indeed, I'm getting approached by a lot of organisations who are completely overwhelmed with the amount of choice out there often end up buying the thing that is the latest fad or gimmick that they're not sure whether it would have any impact or clinical impact. They don't know what to buy, they don't know who to look at, they don't know where to start. And they're not sure why they want it. And they're not sure what that what is actually going to make an impact to employees.

I think it's fair to say that health, mental health and well being was always thought of as an employee benefit. It was something you gave your employees as a way of trying to entice people to come and work for you, or because your competitors did. That is how private health insurance and things in the UK started as a market. I think we're moving from that.

But I think post COVID We're getting into very interesting territory, because for the first time ever, the NHS is overwhelmed, and people cannot get access to care for chronic conditions and for help.

So I think organisations are starting to have to think more strategically about health and mental health care provision. And if I was Boris Johnson, one of the things I would be looking at is tax breaks to organisations buying things such as GP access, or counselling and mental health access, even secondary care support and commissioning it for my employees to get them back to work quicker. So if I was Boris Johnson, one of the ways I would be looking to relieve pressure on the NHS, was to be giving big tax breaks to organisations that are supporting their own staff.

That said, though, I get approached by a lot of organisations who want my help, because they either don't know where to start because they're overwhelmed, or they've spent a lot of money on things that haven't given them the utilisation, they wanted, that haven't given the impact that they have.

And there are so many providers on in the market at the moment now, promising the world but very few of them have really good clinical outcomes.

I help organisations look strategically at what they want, what do they want spend to be on what are they trying to achieve, how it fits into their health and mental health strategy. For some I'm writing an RFP and helping organisations know how to challenge the clinical effectiveness and efficacy of potential providers, looking at outcomes, and then helping them go through the process of choosing the right provider, but then implementing, because I think with health care and where mental health care is going, it's going to get more expensive, organisations are going to spend more on it, but you want to make sure that your spend is as efficient and effective as possible.

What I've seen in many large organisations is that spend on wellbeing activities across the organisation and on things that have little impact. Apart from making people feel better for a day or two, far better to spend strategically on GP services on things that will actually help people get back to work quicker set off off and make really effective use of prevention and education to try and prevent people getting ill in the first place.

So I'm interested to hear your experiences about health and mental health providers, what you see spend on whether you think it should shift whether you agree with me that it's something that organisations should look at from a strategic and business point of view.

As always, I'd like your thoughts and comments below. And I'll be covering this topic in different ways again soon.