"The worrying part is that our research suggests many employers think access is working better than their employees do."
- Ian Talbot - Healix Health
Healix Health's Hidden Workplace Healthcare Gap report has found that 49% of UK employers plan to expand their workplace healthcare benefits in 2026, despite the fact that one in ten employees haven't tried to use the benefits they already have.
Nine in ten employers, or 91%, think their employees find workplace healthcare benefits easy to access, compared to 69% of employees who say they've found these benefits easy to use.
This gap is wider still at organisations with 2,000 to 6,000 employees, where 90% of employers think access is easy compared with just 63% of the workforce.
In addition, 98% of employers are confident employees can get timely healthcare when they need it, compared with 87% of employees themselves, while 96% say their benefits meet employee needs, compared with 83% of employees.
In terms of the biggest barriers to employees accessing workplace health benefits, one of the most cited among employers is confidentiality concerns at 29%. However, just 14% of employees say this is a barrier, the lowest of any barrier cited by employees.
Instead, employees report practical barriers, with a lack of available appointments, time-consuming processes, and long waiting times each cited by 19% of employees.
Among younger workers, 26% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they don't know how to access their workplace healthcare benefits, more than double the 10% of employees aged over 55 who say the same, and just 6% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they haven't faced any barriers at all, compared with 29% of employees overall. This means that the vast majority of younger workers have run into at least one barrier when trying to use their benefits.
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Waiting times and appointment availability are a much bigger problem for this age group too. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, 28% say waiting times were too long and the same proportion say appointments or support weren't available when they needed them, compared with 19% of all employees for each.
This comes as businesses in the government's Keep Britain Working programme draw up new best practice guidelines on workplace health, due by the end of the year. Healix Health says that its research points to a consistent pattern of employer overconfidence, and that the guidelines will only make a real difference if they're built around what employees actually experience, not what employers assume.
"Employers are putting serious money into workplace healthcare, but if their people can't access it or don't even know it's there, a lot of that money is effectively going to waste," Ian Talbot, CEO at Healix Health, said.
"The worrying part is that our research suggests many employers think access is working better than their employees do. That means problems can go unnoticed and, when they do emerge, employers may not always be clear on what’s actually stopping people from using the support available.
"With employers being asked to do more to keep people healthy and in work, and new best practice guidance on the way, the focus has to be on how a scheme actually works from an employee's point of view, from how easy it is to book to how long it takes to be seen, rather than judging it on what's been bought."
