Less than two-fifths of businesses in the North East provide for the health and wellbeing of their staff, recent research has revealed.
According to a study by PMI Health Group, only 38 per cent of North East employees claim their employers provide benefits targeted towards improving their overall health. Only those in the North West fared worse (26 per cent).
The region has however experienced a significant improvement on last year’s results (25 per cent), but is still below the 2015 national average of 42 per cent.
“Although the boost in benefit provision is encouraging, companies in the North East could still give greater consideration to employee health and wellbeing,” said PMI Health Group director Mike Blake.
“With increasing restrictions in NHS provision, it is in the interests of businesses to minimise the costly impact of sickness absence. Corporate healthcare initiatives can help achieve this while helping to address health inequalities.”
In contrast, Scotland was the best performing region with 47 per cent of workers stating their company make provisions to look after their health and wellbeing, closely followed by the East of England (46 per cent) and London (45 per cent).
The increase in provision for workers in the North East has been reflected in burgeoning levels of satisfaction. The study found that 55 per cent of employees in the region are satisfied with the range of benefits they receive from their employers – up from 36 per cent in 2014.
Workers in London were found to be the most content with 67 per cent happy with their benefits provision.