Proactive Mental Health Support Can Support Global Economy

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1:00Carol Massar:Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you've ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it. That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person. How you need it. Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

1:44Carol Massar:Carol got this on our radar this morning on our editorial call. Climate change contributing to higher nighttime temperatures that are causing people to lose an average of almost 56 hours of sleep a year and threatening health. This is according to a new study. I definitely hear from people. It's just it's so hot. I can't sleep. I'm not sleeping well. And, you know, Tim and I... It doesn't help to have the electric company say, put your thermostat at 70 degrees. That's why you sleep with an ice pack or something. But no, but you and I talk about it every time we go to a doctor. It's like, how are you sleeping?

2:10Carol Massar:Are you getting sleep? How important it is to help? Well, it's not just warmer temps that can keep us up at night. Major life events. I mean, losing a loved one, coming back to work after becoming a parent, going through a divorce. Those things can have significant impacts when it comes to mental health and, of course, productivity as well. We've got Sam Miley with us, head of forecasting and thought leadership at the Center for Economics and Business Research. Also, Andrea Christie-David, director of mental health at the international private health care company Bupa. Sam joins us from Madrid.

2:38Carol Massar:Andrea is in Sydney. Sam, I want to start with you because you and the folks at the Center for Economics and Business Research were behind this study. And$42 billion a year is the number that is lost or at least could be saved if we figure out how to handle this proactively. How did you do this study and come to that conclusion? So the team at Bupa were particularly interested in understanding how people respond to certain big life moments in the context of the workplace. So say if you're going through a divorce, if you're becoming a parent or a carer, how does that then translate into the workplace?

3:20Are you taking more time off? Are you still going to work but performing at less than your typical capacity? These are the types of channels we were looking at and ultimately looking to quantify.

3:31Carol Massar:It's significant. And listen, I hate to put things in dollars, but it's certainly what gets CEOs' attention. Sam, it's what gets, you know, economies, leaders of countries their attention. I mean, there is an impact. You know, I feel like we've talked about this. Why was it important to do this particular study? What new light was shed for you? well it ultimately puts a quite tangible cost to the impact of our mental well-being and in that sense it's the the most digestible way to to understand what is quite a human and emotional phenomenon i think what's most interesting to me about this is the proactive approach because and talking about mental health at work is is nothing new and in workplaces i think at least in many parts of the United States and in bigger companies that have the resources are certainly seem like they're starting to take this seriously.

4:27Carol Massar:And I would say COVID really opened up this conversation. Absolutely. Andrea, come on in here because I'm curious about a proactive approach to mental health instead of a reactive approach. What does that mean? It means normalizing it, right? We are all going to experience challenges with our mental health from time to time and it's okay to talk about it. It means being aware that we're going to have these bumps in the road and identifying what tools you might use. That might be talking to friends, increasing exercise, looking at chatting to your GP even as the first port of call. But at Bupa, because we are setting up these mind-place clinics across the globe, we really want to be part of that preventative conversation.

5:13And in Australia so far, we're finding that 50 % of our patients that are coming through have never accessed mental health support before. So it's showing that even by putting these types of sites on foot traffic available to the public means it's more accessible and it's easier for people to feel like there is a place to go when they're even starting to feel some of these challenges. Andrea, there's, you know, making sure that there are places for

5:38Carol Massar:people to go or to talk to certainly one aspect. But I also think we still as a society, corporate society, personal society, the support of having it, whether it's family, friends, you know, those you work with, like that is also an important component to this. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I mean about normalizing it. You know, we're all going to go through it at some stage. Even these examples that we looked at, losing a loved one, getting married, having a baby or losing a baby even, right? We know how challenging those are because we've all been touched by it at some point. So it's okay, whether you're the CEO, whether you're an aged care worker, to actually feel like we can talk about it at work, we can take the time that we need, and we feel like our employer is going to support us.

6:25I mean, the research showed that globally, 1.7 billion days of work are lost each year. Wow. Because of this. That's staggering. So imagine if we were more proactive, and we normalised it, and we said, okay, you've got this live event coming up, and you talked to your staff about it and you prepared them and you gave them access to these types of services just to ensure they have a smooth transition in and out of these major life events yeah it's at 1.7 billion working

6:53Carol Massar:days 636 billion dollars in lost productivity uh sam come on back in here because of the center for economics and business research this is this is what you study it's not easy to to sort of implement change such as this across an organization but based on the research that you've done what would you say are the things that workplaces need to prioritize in order to, I mean, look, it's easy to make the economic argument here, but it's not easy to necessarily make the change in a workplace to figure this out. I think the key conclusion that goes back to the point on being proactive, the research found that those who were proactive were able to return to work faster, suffered less of a productivity impact.

7:36So the main takeaway for business is that encouraging that productivity, being an open workplace is not just beneficial for the individual, but also for the organization and indeed at scale for the economy as a whole.

7:50Carol Massar:One of the things, you know, Sam, I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about how you guys did this survey and how it worked out and how you actually went about kind of grabbing the data or finding the data. Did you sit down with individuals? Was it companies? Like, tell me a little bit about the process. I'm curious about it. Absolutely. So the survey was fielded to over 13 ,000 workers across several major markets. And we first of all asked these workers about the rate at which they experienced these life events. And we find that of the life events considered in the study, around 10 to 15 percent of the population will experience any one of them in a given year so it's quite a large share of people are going through this at any given time and then amongst those who've had recent experience of those events so divorce marriage bereavement we then asked about what the impact channels were we asked about emotional aspects but then we also drilled down into the workplace too whether they took time off how long that was whether they stayed in the workplace but underperformed and how long they felt they underperformed for.

8:59Carol Massar:Interesting. I want to ask you guys both something though, and forgive me, and maybe it's just because we're into numbers here. So the global economy is, if you measure it through GDP, is about$126 trillion. So we're talking about$636 billion in lost productivity. I haven't done the percentage, but just a little perspective there. I'm not saying it's not important, but I do think again - Less than 1%. It is less than 1%. So I think, you know, how do we think about that against other stress points? I feel like financial, like we talk so much about, you know, the cost of housing, the cost of food.

9:41Carol Massar:I don't know. Come on back in, Andrea, because, you know, when you think about helping people, there's a lot that are coming at individuals. Absolutely. So we have found even things like the cost of access to mental health is a barrier because of cost of living. You know, we're looking at interest rate impact on how many people might come to our service. So we're looking at interesting ways to break down that barrier through low cost models. And fortunately, in Australia, we have Medicare, which covers part of your access to mental health treatment. So how do we waive the out of pocket fee, for example?

10:17So we know that those types of stresses increase things like family breakdowns, defaulting on mortgages, and therefore may cause major life events.

10:30Carol Massar:I'm glad you brought up the policy differences in different countries. And I'm wondering, Andrea, if there is a way that you think governments, and it's sort of anathema to talk about here in the United States in this political environment, but if there's something that policymakers you think could do on a large scale to address this. in australia we are really fortunate we place a lot of focus on mental health our government has invested in public mental health services as i said they fund some of these services that our clinics deliver and because this is a global project and i've been fortunate to work with our european and uk colleagues on this what i've identified is that in australia our funding is carried by the patient, whereas in a lot of those other countries, the funding sits with a contract that the provider must hold.

11:26And what that's meant for us in Australia is that the patient can choose their provider. They can choose whether to go to a not-for-profit or a private service like ours. They can choose whether to use all of their funding with us or part of it. So it's been a really interesting learning, and I've been sharing that with our European and UK colleagues in terms of some of that public policy advocacy. We're really lucky that we can get quite close to government here being such a strong brand like Bupa, and we have regular conversations with them about what we're doing in these spaces across all of our health services, and they really listen.

11:59I was meeting with a chief of staff just last week who was fascinated by what we were doing, and they thought, well, if Bupa's investing in these types of services, how can we leverage what you're doing to support better social need and impact?

12:13Carol Massar:Which is great to hear. Hey, Sam, just saved about 30, 40 seconds here. You attend briefings at the Bank of England after monetary policy decisions. You've been consulted on the economy by a number of government departments. You are head of forecasting and thought leadership leaders. Are they sensitive to this? Are they increasingly looking at factors like this that impact the economy, but impact really the well-being of their people? Just quickly. absolutely and to return to a point made at the top of the session i think this has increased markedly since the covid19 pandemic and the way that that completely uprooted traditional working practices it's put mental health at the forefront of the office conversation and i think that will only increase with time really interesting um we appreciate you both sam miley head of forecasting and thought leadership at the center for economics and business research and Andrea Christie-David, Director of Mental Health at the International Private Healthcare Company, Rupa, joining us there, both of them remotely.

13:16Carol Massar:Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you've ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it. That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person how you need it. Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks.

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