Working To Wellbeing has partnered with BW Consulting to enable more advisers to access the firm’s rehabilitation services.
The new partnership aims to help Working to Wellbeing work more closely with advisers to ensure more of their clients can access vocational rehabilitation services, either as a standalone proposition or via their health or risk concierge services.
These services are designed to support employees with chronic conditions to stay in work, while also facilitating returns to work for employees following long-term absence.
BW Consulting was set up earlier this year by Barry Waring, who previous worked at YuLife as head of broker distribution and head of strategic partnerships.
This announced comes at a time when there is evidence that line managers are less confident about supporting employees with long-term health conditions.
Recent research from Working To Wellbeing found that 56 per cent of line managers surveyed feel confident in this regard, compared to 70 per cent when this research was last carried out in 2022.
BW Consulting founder Barry Waring says: “To date in our industry, vocational rehabilitation is primarily introduced to employer clients via group income protection. It works well there. But scaling it up in a way that meets Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working goals necessitates vocational rehab collaborations with advisers as well as insurers.
“And to ensure adviser and client confidence, such collaborations demand a service provider that’s highly experienced, evidence-based and firmly centred on human-to-human support. Working To Wellbeing meets all these criteria.”
Working To Wellbeing’s managing director Dr Julie Denning says that vocational rehab is a crucial and often missing link between health and work support.
She adds: “It represents a core evidence-based component of any effective stay-in-work and return-to-work strategy, especially in smaller businesses, where support can be fragmented, data-light and increasingly digital, losing the human connection people need.
“By collaborating with advisers, we can ensure our essential services reach more organisations, helping build employer confidence to support all their employees to thrive, whatever their complex health needs or chronic challenges.”
