About us
Health, Work and Well-being is a cross-Government initiative to protect and improve the health and well-being of working age people.
The initiative promotes the positive links between health and work and aims to help more people with health conditions to find and stay in employment. It brings together employers, trade unions, healthcare professionals and other partners and builds on a growing evidence base that working is good for health. The initiative began in 2005.
Our partners
The Health, Work and Well-being Strategy initiative is sponsored by five Government partners –
- Department for Work and Pensions
- Department of Health
- Health and Safety Executive
- Scottish Government
- Welsh Assembly Government
We also carry out research and initiatives jointly with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department for Education.
As well as content on this website, we publish content in partnership with the following cross-Government websites.
Why is Health, Work and Well-being important?
There is growing evidence that health, work and well-being are closely connected.
Work is known to be the best route out of poverty. The 2006 report, "Is work good for your health and well-being?" found that work is also usually good for health.
For all age groups, work generally:
- makes people healthier
- helps people with a health condition get better
- improves the health of people returning to work from unemployment.
Far more people gain health benefits from work than suffer negative effects:
- The long-term unemployed or those who have never worked are two to three times more likely to have poor health than those in work.
- People are twice as likely to become psychologically distressed after going from work to unemployment.
Today there are still too many people who are unable to work due to ill health: 2.6 million people are currently claiming incapacity benefits – with 600,000 coming on to the benefit each year – while 1.4 million people aged 50-59 have already retired due to ill-health.
Absence has further health implications too - the longer someone is out of work due to ill-health, the lower their chance of getting back into work:
- If you're off sick for six months, you have an 80% chance of being off for five years.
- 90% of people making a claim for incapacity benefits expect to return to work, but if you claim for two years or more, you are more likely to retire or die than return to work.
With 1 million people reporting sick each week, businesses suffer too. The Confederation of British Industry has estimated that 175 million working days were lost last year to sickness absence, at a cost to the economy of £13 billion.
The good news is that most common health problems can be accommodated by employers. Common health problems account for two-thirds of longer-term sickness absence, incapacity for work and ill-health retirement. By addressing Health, Work and Well-being we can therefore make a real and substantial difference to the health of individuals and the cost to businesses and the economy.
For more information on the research and evidence base on health and work, please visit Resources.
More about health and work
