12.07.2012
The Swiss TPH Offers a Cost-Benefit Analysis Tool for Employee Health Programmes
Employers in middle and low income countries lose great numbers of employees to the double burden of disease. Many employers have begun employee health programs to stem the rising tide of productivity losses. The Swiss Centre for International Health of the Swiss TPH offers a powerful tool to prioritize productivity losses through employee health problems. Furthermore, the tool enables easy cost-benefit analysis of interventions to make a strong business case for employee health investments.
The tool (developed with GIZ) uses country specific disease information for prioritizing employee health problems. It is a cost-benefit model designed for business or public sector employers in low and middle-income countries. The model guides investments to safeguard and improve the health of staff. It calculates the annual cost of each illness and condition affecting employees in easy to understand terms of lost productive days and the salary costs of these days. The tool ranks the health problems in order of estimated productivity to be lost.
The model is unique in offering the following fully flexible features:
- Disease and health risk information for employees based on country/context specific health statistics:
- top twenty causes of sickness
- top ten causes of death
- top ten health risk factors
- Conversion of the employee health problems into an evidence-informed estimate of productivity losses:
- lost work days
- medical expense refunds
- Easy identification of the drivers of productivity losses by ranking the problems to quickly establish the most "expensive" health problems to be addressed
- Saving start-up costs by avoiding expensive comprehensive health risk assessments for each employee
- Simple cost-benefit analysis to make the business case for investments in employee health by comparing intervention investment costs against the potential productivity savings (work days saved, medical expenses saved)
- Easy cost-benefit comparison of individual interventions and packages of interventions
- Fast and effective way to plan and monitor employee health programs
- Minimal costs to use the model: The Swiss TPH team will support in
- uploading the country/context specific disease and health risk information
- tailor the model for your specific needs
- brief training/orientation for using the tool
- provide prompt support services as required
The model has already shown success for the Ghana Revenue Agencies and the Ghana Community Network Services Limited, as well as for Aqua Vitens Rand Limited with the Ghana Water Company Limited. The model was used to quantify and prioritize the most important causes of productivity losses due to sickness and death in the GIZ-ReCHT partner employers mentioned above.
The top five causes of productivity losses were:
- Malaria (24.99%),
- Hypertension (12.42%)
- HIV/AIDS (7.34%)
- Skin diseases (5.87%)
- Obesity (5.65%)
These top five health issues were seen to cause over half of the productivity losses estimated by the model. The accuracy of the model's forecast of total health-related productivity losses was strongly supported (almost 100%) by the historical data available of actual sick days recorded.
For more information contact Patrick Hanlon, patrick.hanlon@unibas.ch