THE FIFTH CONFERENCE HEALTH - Belgian perspectives on how to improve healthcare
Healthy employees in a healthy company
Mensura has made health and safety in the workplace its core business and specialist area, but as General Director Roland Vanden Eede argues, the company could do so much more if the regulatory environment was more focused on real health objectives The safety and health of employees have a direct impact on the results of a company. However, the current legislation and social security system in Belgium do not offer the right incentives for companies to improve their employees’ health. Roland Vanden Eede of Mensura sees solutions in goal commitments and flexible job regulations.
privatized matter, so an employer can negotiate with his insurance company and reduce its premiums if he puts some safety measures in place, which is a direct financial incentive to prevent work accidents.
A company’s results depend directly on the health and vitality of its employees. Mensura helps companies with advice and solutions concerning insurance, prevention, absenteeism, safety audits, and so on. Roland Vanden Eede, general director of Mensura External Department for Prevention and Protection at work, explains the number one reason to work with Mensura: “To do their job efficiently, entrepreneurs need to focus on their core business. We assist them by handling the legal obligations a company is required to comply with respect to safety and health. These tasks are the oil in the wheelwork of entrepreneurship. Look at it this way: employees are the most expensive machines in a company. So if you sign maintenance contracts for your machines, you might do the same for your personnel, because the happiness and health of each employee has a direct impact on your company.”
Vanden Eede looks at Denmark for inspiration about the right way to manage incentives: the social partners have agreed there that in five years they want to achieve some specific goals, e.g. in the context of noise prevention. How that is achieved exactly is left to the
Towards the right incentives
54
Unfortunately, the work climate in Belgium is not ideal because of the complex and counteracting legislation and bureaucracy. Vanden Eede points to the Belgian state structure: “A big problem in Belgium is that all things that have to do with the curative aspects of illness are handled at the federal level, decided by the social partners, managed by a state agency and paid for by the employer fees. At the same time, all preventive aspects are regional material. This means that an employer who invests in prevention doesn’t get any return on this because he is compelled to pay a proportion of the wages for the curative part anyway, so there’s no incentive whatsoever to invest in prevention.” Contrast this to work accidents: this is a
Another issue in Belgium is that the social partners don’t focus on the goals but on the means.
‘
Employees are the most expensive machines in a company.
employers, but the important thing is that all social partners support these goals. “In Belgium, the social partners always focus on the means, by agreeing on lots of healthcare actions, but that doesn’t work: these actions are not our goals, our goal is to have healthy employees. To be effective, we need a goal commitment, not a means commitment.” Vanden Eede is happy that the Flemish government tries to do something on that level: they set specific health goals, e.g. for vaccination grades, suicide prevention, healthy food, physical exercise, and so on. Those are all clear policy goals that Mensura can work with. But even in Flanders this doesn’t happen in a structural way: “If you really want to achieve these health goals efficiently, you need another model for financing. Right now, the financing of social security happens based on the number of employees, while it really should be based on the achieved objectives. This would add another incentive to reach those