Guest blog by Carl Wells PhD
My career has been rooted in high-performance sport supporting athletes at the highest levels, alongside postgraduate academic study. One key lesson is that high performance rarely comes from a single intervention or discipline. It comes from creating an ecosystem around the individual, combining clinical expertise, physical performance, psychology, nutrition and rehabilitation. This led me to create the P3RFORM holistic support methodology centred on three pillars of Movement, Mindset and Lifestyle. Those principles provide a powerful opportunity to fundamentally rethink the role of occupational health within organisations.
Occupational health plays a critical role in supporting employees when they become unwell, injured, absent or require specialist workplace health advice. But what if its role could be broader? Considering how athletes are supported in elite sport, what if occupational health became the strategic hub of a wider employee health ecosystem, connecting clinical occupational health with on-site leisure facilities that provide holistic health, wellbeing, and rehabilitation services. This would represent a shift from a predominantly single discipline reactive model to one centred on prevention, early intervention, and proactive workforce health management.
Athletes are not simply treated when something goes wrong. Their health and performance are supported continuously. The objective is to understand the individual, preventing health issues via the development of their physical and mental resilience, while also identifying emerging issues and create the right intervention before a problem becomes more significant. Why shouldn't we apply the same philosophy to workforce health?
Many organisations already invest significantly in occupational health, gyms and leisure facilities, health assessments, wellbeing programmes, and employee support schemes. The problem is that these services often operate independently, and employees are then expected to navigate the system themselves. In elite sport, we would never expect an athlete to work out whether they need the doctor, physiotherapist, strength and conditioning coach, psychologist, or nutritionist. The multidisciplinary environment is designed to understand the individual and connect them with the right expertise.
The opportunity in the workplace is to create the same principle of integration. An employee should not necessarily have to decide which service they need. A standardised occupational health process that begins with a high-quality triage process should help understand their needs and direct them towards the most appropriate blend of holistic support to meet their Movement, Mindset and Lifestyle needs. The objective is not to increase utilisation of individual services; it is to provide the most effective health and wellness support solutions.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from elite sport is the importance of prevention. Performance environments continually look for opportunities to reduce risk, optimise health, and intervene early. Utilising objective measures to highlight potential health and wellness problems and inform intervention design is a bedrock in sport and workforce health provision would benefit from adopting the same philosophy. This ties in with the theme of Occupational Health Awareness Week 2026, 21st-27th September (resources here).
For example, an employee experiencing early musculoskeletal discomfort may benefit from clinical and physical profiling to identify the cause and create an intervention programme to not only resolve the issue but prevent its future reoccurrence. Alternatively, someone experiencing declining energy, poor sleep or unhealthy lifestyle behaviours may benefit from Lifestyle and Mindset coaching before those issues begin to affect their health or performance.
This is where occupational health, on-site leisure facilities and health and wellbeing coaching can become particularly powerful when they operate as one ecosystem. The leisure facility becomes more than a place to exercise. It becomes a preventative health environment. Coaches become more than people delivering fitness sessions. They become part of a broader pathway supporting behaviour change and healthy lifestyles. Occupational health becomes more than a service responding to referrals. It becomes a source of clinical expertise, assessment, governance, and escalation when required.
One of the most significant lessons from elite sport is the value of data-informed decision making. High-performance teams use data to record what has happened, and understand what is happening, identify emerging trends, inform interventions, and measure outcomes. The same principle could transform the way organisations approach occupational health.
An integrated workforce health ecosystem has the potential to bring together appropriately governed and anonymised information from occupational health, absence, health assessments, leisure facility engagement, coaching, rehabilitation, benefits utilisation, and other relevant sources. It is in turning data into actionable insight. At an individual level, data can help practitioners understand a person's needs, establish appropriate baselines, identify changes and support more personalised interventions. At workforce level, analytics can identify patterns and emerging areas of risk.
This creates the potential to move occupational health from reacting to demand to anticipating it. If elite sport has taught us anything, it is that the best health systems do not wait for problems to appear. They create a connected environment designed to prevent them, identify them early and provide the right support when they do.
Carl Wells PhD is Head of Product and Performance, joining P3RFORM in 2023 following twenty years as a sport and exercise scientist with professional football. Carl is passionate about applying his experiences from high performing environments to enhance the effectiveness of preventative health and fitness services delivered to individuals and organisations.