Guest blog by Sarah Van Zoelen, Occupational Health Advisor
My time as the Head of Occupational Health and Wellbeing at Loughborough University was a perfect moment in time.
I joined the service as an Occupational Health Nurse Adviser (OHA) when the service was not functioning effectively. Dr Steve Boorman recently carried out an audit and identified 38 urgent priorities that needed addressing.
I first I needed to try and determine what the service needed in terms of manpower. Occupational health (OH) was woefully underused, handling about 100 referrals a year for circa 4,000 staff. It was seen as slow, untrusted, and provided reports that merely repeated employees’ wishes. Whilst we established the service, we partnered with a provider that subcontracted an OHA to our team.
Neil Budworth (Health, Safety and Wellbeing Director) was my manager and cheerleader. He was my sponsor – opening doors in the organisation that had previously been closed to OH.
Loughborough University is an organisation that is based on relationships. To start to change the view of OH, I spoke with each of the senior leaders along with the deans and operational managers for the nine schools. This provided an opportunity to describe my vision for the service and commit to delivering this to their school.
My view of OH is we are ideally placed to offer a 'lifestyle medicine' approach. My experience has shown me that the reason someone is referred into the service is often only the surface of a wider set of challenges that they are facing. Access to GP services can be challenging and OH provides an opportunity for empowering employees on their wider health journey whilst supporting them in the workplace.
Shaping OH reports to be evidence-based and high quality, delivered the same day as the appointment and offering appointments no more than a week after receiving the referral all helped to create a new impression of the service.
Employees felt more supported, managers received a clear guidance on how best to manage the absence cases, and I was able to determine the pockets of additional need and explore ways of addressing this. We moved from partnering with a provider, to an inhouse team and to keep investing in the specialism I was keen we became a training team – recruiting and training nurses to become fully qualified OHAs. I wanted to make sure that we could educate our nurses into the lifestyle medicine approach of OH as it is my belief that this is more satisfying for the team and more beneficial for the ‘customer’.
Loughborough University is world renown for sport and has a fabulous proactive physiotherapy service for the sports teams. I worked closely with the team to set up a collaborative relationship with the elite physiotherapy service. This meant that employees could also benefit from physiotherapy support instead of waiting for the 12 weeks plus NHS services. It also gave employees access to rehabilitation gyms to achieve better outcomes than traditional NHS physiotherapy pathways.
Once quality had been established, we could move onto the more proactive wellbeing side of the service. With any large organisation, sharing appropriate messages among 4,000 staff was challenging. I set up a wellbeing framework and training for employees who were keen to help deliver wellbeing messages. They were also the ‘local knowledge’ for their schools and departments and could share the real concerns experienced in their area so that we could make them visible and address them.
When I left the University, we had approximately 100 wellbeing champions, present in all schools and services, who were vital to supporting the changing people culture of the university.
My time at Loughborough ended when I needed to practise what I preached: my sandwich-generation family needed more support, and I needed a shorter commute, I was fortunate to take up a role with COPE Occupational Health. But I was genuinely honoured that my family were able to be there when I was presented with the university medal for outstanding service. For me this continues to raise the profile of OH and wellbeing. It also shouts to a culture where the importance of its people is being recognised.