Employers’ health advice line proves a costly flop

Workplace Health Connect (WHC), a multi-million-pound project to provide telephone advice on workplace health issues to small and medium-sized firms, has officially been branded a failure.

Launched in February 2006 as an offshoot of the HSE, WHC has already attracted widespread criticism from safety campaigners. And now an evaluation of its first 16 months carried out for the HSE by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) has found that the advice line is “primarily of interest to employers as a source of advice about safety-related matters”, with only 11% of callers having a specific health enquiry.

Additionally, “overall call levels to the advice line remain well below the initial targets”. Just over 9,000 calls were received between February 2006 and May 2007, which works out at about 20 calls a day – meaning that WHC receives only two calls each day relating to specific workplace health issues.

“We answer more health-based queries before breakfast, and we have no budget for advice work,” observed Jawad Qasrawi, the manager of Hazards magazine. “Compared to primary-care-based occupational health projects and workers’ health and safety advice centres like the Greater Manchester Hazards Centre, WHC is a costly flop. This money could be better targeted and much better used.”

The IES’s report is available at www.hse.gov.uk/workplacehealth/whcreportjul07.pdf