Workplace health is increasingly supporting the NHS – but rising costs and demand are creating a headache for employers

15 May 2026

Corporate healthcare will not replace the NHS – but it is increasingly picking up the slack for our National Health Service.

This was the conclusion of a recent high-level thought leadership event ‘Applying long-term thinking to short-term decision-making’ held in London by health insurer, WPA.

Stephen Collier, previously CEO of BMI Healthcare and Chair of the Healthcare Purchasing Alliance, outlined how healthcare delivered through the workplace is becoming an increasingly expected part of working life.

“Employer-funded private medical insurance has moved from being a nice-to-have perk to a critical, essential need for employees,” he told the audience of corporate clients and intermediaries.

“The problem is that it is easy to give it to staff but very difficult to withdraw; it becomes part of what they see as their ‘entitlement’. As new benefits are introduced, whether it’s primary care, gender dysphoria, fertility or neurodiversity, and as the working age of staff steadily increases, we are creating a bit of a treadmill for ourselves because we have to continue to fund something that we decided to make available in very different times.

“The longer-term impact of some of that is just becoming clear. What we see year-on-year is that there has been a 4% annual growth in the insured population. If you extrapolate that even for 10 years, it is a massive shift,” he added.

This means employers need to rethink their purpose and what they want from health benefits, argued organisational health psychologist Professor Sir Cary Cooper, Chair of the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work.

Companies need to focus on creating and supporting healthier, more productive workforces rather than simply adding more benefits. They also need to be prioritising more preventative healthcare approaches.  Alongside this, Professor Sir Cary warned that stress, burnout and mental ill health are all increasing.

“Do proper wellbeing, not just the wellbeing day, not just the mental health first aid, all the low-hanging fruit,” he said, making the case for more board-level, strategic approaches, ideally led by a director of health and wellbeing and a nominated board director.

Professor Sir Cary Cooper – who coined the term ‘presenteeism’ (or continuing to struggle into work while unwell) – also identified ‘underload’ as becoming a growing problem alongside job ‘overload’.

“What we’re seeing now in job-insecure times is underload. People not having enough to do and being worried their employer knows that they don’t have enough to do, and their employer is trying to save money by getting rid of people,” he said, urging employers to take a more strategic, preventative approach to healthcare provision.

Professor Sir Cary will be unveiling his latest report ‘Practical Approaches for Measuring Workplace Health and Wellbeing’ at the House of Commons next month.

Ellis Turley (pictured above), WPA’s Head of Corporate, added: “Benefit design is a major part of our take-on and renewal conversations so that corporate customers can truly understand the shorter and longer-term implications to, and the sustainability of, their corporate healthcare strategies.”