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Case Study: Britvic

At Britvic there is a long history of supporting employees both at work and at home, offering benefits like healthcare, dental benefits and driver safety training. But the company felt it could do more.

Although Britvic has engineered out a large proportion of manual handling tasks, sickness absence statistics and claims on the Healthcare Plan indicated that a significant reason for ill health and injury within the business related to musculo-skeletal problems.

Working with its occupational health partners, Healthcare RM (HRM), Britvic identified that a large proportion of musculoskeletal problems were caused by multiple factors. With HRM and the administrators of the Healthcare Plan, a musculo-skeletal management service was introduced, which helps employees to access the most appropriate clinician treatment and also supports them with improving exercise and lifestyle factors that may be contributing to the problem. As an added incentive, the usual financial excess is waived for Healthcare Plan claims.

Rather than having to visit their GP for a referral, employees can now directly contact the HRM Careline, where a trained physiotherapist will assess them over the phone and take them through a stepped care programme:

• Step 1: Assessment and self-help information
• Step 2: Case management and guided self-help
• Step 3: Telephone physiotherapy
• Step 4: Face-to-face treatment
• Step 5: Functional rehabilitation or specialist intervention

There has been some very positive feedback from employees who have gone through the programme. One employee said: “It was great being able to speak to a physiotherapist the same day without having to wait for a GP appointment. I was emailed some exercises that I could start straight away and the HRM case managers and physiotherapist were in regular contact with me to make sure I was seeing the right improvements, which I'm pleased to say I was”.

The big difference to the traditional route is that employees are encouraged to engage in self-management and ensure that care is appropriate and monitored to deliver effective outcomes to the individual.

For example an employee suffering from back pain contacted the Careline which was very concerned that something 'serious' might be wrong. Physical, psychological and occupational issues were addressed and the employee made a full recovery without the need for any specialist intervention. The employee was happy and the costs of sickness absence and healthcare costs were avoided.

The Careline offers consistency of service to employees, ensuring that they are given the best possible service to manage their health effectively and help them back to work as quickly as possible.

The Careline is working so effectively it has been decided to extend this service to psychological problems to further improve employees' state of health and wellbeing.

More Information

FDF has published a booklet called Workplace Wellbeing: The Food Industry in Action (pdf, 984kb) which features many workplace wellbeing schemes .

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