Generali UK will now offer Teladoc Health’s new mental health navigator service as part of its group income protection policy.
This will be offer to all GIP policyholders and their adult family members as part of its range of early intervention and rehabilitation services. There will be no increased premium cost.
This ‘Best Doctors Mental Health Navigator’ service is designed to identify the correction diagnosis and provide an action plan for those struggling with a range of mental health conditions, including anxiety, stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The service uses qualified pyschologists, psychiatrists and clinicians and will be fully integrated into Generali’s comprehensive care pathways.
This launch comes at a time when statistics indicate that one in four people in the UK experience a mental health problem each year. However three quarters of those with such problems receive no support at all.
The cost to the UK economy is estimated at £105bn a year, with the cost to UK employers estimated to be some £30bn, through lost production, recruitment and absence.
Generali Employee Benefit UK head of claims Colin Hawes says: “UK businesses and employees are currently bombarded with a confusing array of mental health support services: at last count, around 3,000 self-care apps are available for example.
“And pressure is increasingly being placed on line managers and mental health first aiders to identify problems and appropriately signpost to relevant and useful solutions.
“It’s an incredibly complex landscape. In order to know where to turn, employees need to be first helped by mental health trained clinicians to understand the problem. Only then can they learn how to fix it. This is one of the ways the Best Doctors’ service is strengthening our mental health care pathway.”
Teladoc Health Europe director Dominic Howard adds: “For employers mental health is one of the biggest challenges facing their business. Our recent global mental health study revealed that over half of employees globally (55 per cent) agree more should be done in their workplace to improve mental health, with more than a third (38 per cent) saying they would be more productive at work if there was better mental health support.
“Our mental health navigator service can deliver employees the support they need on their terms, filling a critical gap in access to mental healthcare services for whatever issue they may be struggling with.”