#3 Health & Well-being Conference
Posted by Kate Broom on Thursday, October 14, 2010
What an exhausting day! 400 delegates, speakers, breakout groups, lunch, more breakouts and more speakers ending at 5.00 and then negotiating a rush-hour to get home.
The conference overall was very interesting although not particularly inspirational. It was main stream, not related to art at all but most stimulation for getting a feel of where the government is going, where the money will go.
My quick impressions are these:
1. Health & Well-being are linked but the emphasis is changing to well-being defined as having resilience to adversities, such as ill-health, redundancy and similar life changes.
2. There is a linkage between work, health and well-being. This is reflected in the ministerial responsibilities of the goverment to make changes. Work is a major part of this as it is "healthy to work, which encourages a sense of well-being".
3. Cutting costs is behind a lot of the initiatives (no surprise there) but there was also a lot of talk about retaining staff in order to reduce the costs of re-training new staff. Part of this was a discussion about incentives and rewarding the adoption of new behaviours and getting smaller workforces to be more productive. This sounded a lot like change management and an increase in the skills of managers to motivate and respond to their staffs well-being.
4. Pulling a sicky - costs companies lots of money and in the NHS can actually risk loss of life (an example was given that a paramedic, attending to a patient, waited for an ambulance to come, which didn't arrive in time because people were off sick and there were insufficient staff to respond to the call.)
5. A major change will be to remove the notion of a sick note and replace this with a fit to work note.
More later......
The conference overall was very interesting although not particularly inspirational. It was main stream, not related to art at all but most stimulation for getting a feel of where the government is going, where the money will go.
My quick impressions are these:
1. Health & Well-being are linked but the emphasis is changing to well-being defined as having resilience to adversities, such as ill-health, redundancy and similar life changes.
2. There is a linkage between work, health and well-being. This is reflected in the ministerial responsibilities of the goverment to make changes. Work is a major part of this as it is "healthy to work, which encourages a sense of well-being".
3. Cutting costs is behind a lot of the initiatives (no surprise there) but there was also a lot of talk about retaining staff in order to reduce the costs of re-training new staff. Part of this was a discussion about incentives and rewarding the adoption of new behaviours and getting smaller workforces to be more productive. This sounded a lot like change management and an increase in the skills of managers to motivate and respond to their staffs well-being.
4. Pulling a sicky - costs companies lots of money and in the NHS can actually risk loss of life (an example was given that a paramedic, attending to a patient, waited for an ambulance to come, which didn't arrive in time because people were off sick and there were insufficient staff to respond to the call.)
5. A major change will be to remove the notion of a sick note and replace this with a fit to work note.
More later......