What is Westfield Health?
Founded in 1919, Westfield Health is a not-for-profit health and wellbeing provider with a very simple philosophy: it’s dedicated to helping people improve their quality of life – living well, working well and achieving more – by empowering them to be healthier and happier.
Our strategic partnerships with world-leading organisations allow us to create evidence-based health and wellbeing programmes that support both physical and emotional wellbeing, from eating well and moving more to sleeping better, thinking clearly and staying healthy.
From health cover to wellbeing workshops, health and lifestyle assessments to online tools, our services deliver sustainable behavioural change that makes a real difference to people’s lives.
What’s the scale of the business?
Today, we support over 8,000 businesses and almost 400,000 customers, with a consultative approach that puts their ever-changing needs first.
We invest any profit we make back into our products and services to make them better for our customers, and we also invest in our Charitable Trust, which has a long history of supporting people, communities and charities through donations. Since 1996, we’ve donated more than £15m to the NHS and health- and wellbeing-related charities.
Tell us about your new partnership with SIV
Emotional and mental wellbeing is fundamental to everything we do as individuals, but as a nation, we have a real issue around mental health. The NHS is routinely oversubscribed, while the private facilities which are offered by corporate employee assistance programmes are often underutilised.
We want to alleviate some of the pressure on GPs and the NHS by giving people the opportunity to get help from an alternative professional source, more quickly. It’s about making mental health support more accessible.
Big White Wall is described by NICE as a tool that’s designed for the pre-contemplation phase of mental health. Mental health support is available on the NHS, but by the time people see their GP, they’re already a long way down the road and talk therapy is often needed. We want people to access the services as soon as they notice a change in themselves, not when they’ve waited until they hit rock bottom.
This is why we’re looking to add the service into gym membership, to support people sooner on their journey to recovery. We felt that providing these services through a gym membership – something people pay for personally – might help them access the mental health support they need easily and quickly.
Not only that, but research shows physical activity has a positive impact on mental health: adults participating in daily physical activity have approximately a 20–30 per cent lower risk of both depression and dementia.
We believe prevention is better than cure, and as only 4 per cent of the NHS budget is spent on prevention.
Giving people the opportunity to stay healthy and happy before they become ill is crucial. That’s why I’m so proud to be offering our services through this partnership with SIV.
There have been challenges getting healthcare professionals to collaborate with health clubs. Is this changing?
I think attitudes have definitely changed over the years, with medical and healthcare professionals seeing the value in the facilities provided by health clubs.
At Westfield Health, we have our own fitness suite for staff and we also hold free weekly exercise classes. We actively encourage our employees to move more during the working day to avoid the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle.
Medical and exercise professionals have described exercise as a ‘magic pill’ for some illnesses, and while our partnership with SIV is unique, I’d like to see more of these schemes evolving to support our nation’s health across the country.
What do you hope to achieve with this scheme?
In the short term, we want to continue to break down the barriers to accessing mental health support, while giving SIV an affordable added-value service to help it attract more members to its facilities.
In the longer term, we would love this concept to become the norm in this industry, helping all facilities look after both physical and emotional wellbeing.
We already have a wide range of health and wellbeing initiatives available, from educational workshops – on topics such as resilience, sleep and energy – to health screenings and health cover. We’re open to discussions on building new concepts alongside a gym chain to help complement its current offering.
And ultimately, we believe our four services – telephone counselling, 24/7 phone-based access to a GP, Big White Wall and benefits scheme – will make a fantastic retention tool. Our average user saves over £300 a year using our rewards platform, which helps make fitness and mental health support affordable to all.
What else do you do?
We sponsor Sheffield Hallam’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC), one of the most advanced research centres for activity in the world.
The AWRC create innovations that improve the health of the nation, tackle key issues such as static levels of activity, rising obesity and mental health problems.
From spring 2019, it will also host indoor and outdoor facilities for 70 researchers to carry out research on health and physical activity, in collaboration with the private sector.
This partnership gives our programmes an academic stamp of approval.
