6th August 2025
Why prevention is moving from the clinic to the boardroom
For decades, Britain has relied on the NHS to do the heavy lifting when it comes to dealing with the consequences of our poor health. But this late-stage approach is running out of time – it’s just too expensive for the exchequer and the productivity of our workforce. With rising rates of chronic illness, record NHS waiting lists and a growing mental health crisis in the workforce, the question is no longer whether prevention matters – but where it should happen, who should lead it and how we fund it.
Lord Bethell, a former health minister and now a leading advocate for preventive innovation, believes the answer lies in what he calls “PreventTech” – a fast-growing category of digital tools, diagnostics, therapeutics and workplace platforms aimed at identifying health risks earlier, treating early-stage disease and reducing demand on acute services. It’s a space, he says, where employers, not just hospitals, will shape the future of public health.
You coined the term ‘PreventTech’. What does it mean – and why is it significant now?
We all love the NHS – it’s there for everyone and it’s free, which is great. But it’s absolutely not able to stretch to many of the problems that people face today. If you break your arm or have severe cancer, the treatment you receive is among the best in the world. But it just doesn’t seem able to cater for the rising demands of chronic diseases, particularly the growing demands of mental health and neurodiversity.
For example, waiting lists for getting an ADHD diagnosis are enormous. They’re not quite shut for business, but the NHS isn’t anywhere near able to diagnose or support all the people who need it. That’s true in other areas of early-stage intervention too. So we need to look to others – companies, schools employers – to fill the gap.
That’s where PreventTech can help: it’s that aspect of the health tech community that’s involved in early-stage preventative health management. The GLP-1 market is a vivid example. About 1.7 million Brits are taking these weight loss solutions – such as Ozempic or Mounjaro – but 1.5 million are doing so outside of the NHS. They’re getting them through Boots, online services like eMed or employer insurance. These are often digital-first solutions. They don’t rely on a large amount of face-to-face work. They use scalable technology to find answers.
What role do you see for employers in this new model of prevention?
A huge amount. I’m Chairman of Business for Health – we champion the principle that employers have an important role. People trust employers. Health problems often present themselves first in the workplace. And when disease gets out of control, it hits both the employer and the workforce significantly.
If someone embedded in your business drops out because of mental health issues or problems at home, that’s a huge cost. Absence is hitting our economy hard. You talk to any employer and they’ll tell you: ‘I can’t believe how many people just aren’t showing up’. It might be because they’re waiting for a scan – or because they’re overwhelmed. And often these problems are relatively easy to fix. But they’re not going to get those fixes from a seven-minute GP appointment.
During the pandemic you talked about transformational government. Do employers now need to think the same way?
We all saw during the pandemic what government can do when it really focuses. But the elastic band has snapped back. Government is now proving to be anything but agile or transformative.
That’s why employers have an opportunity to fill that role – especially in personalised medicine. Often a health issue involves four or five factors: something from childhood, an addiction, a bad manager, plus lack of exercise. That’s too hard for a big bureaucratic system to unpick. But a good health manager or occupational therapist can. They’re often seen as a cattle prod to get people back to work, but they can actually build a tailored package of interventions that helps people recover.
We’ve got a productivity crisis, a health inequality crisis and a burnout crisis. Are they all the same problem?
We definitely have a bad health problem. Obesity in particular drives cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, musculoskeletal disease – and depression. It’s society-wide but more prevalent among lower-income groups.
And we’re missing the window. People don’t leave work the day they get sick. It is often a slow deterioration and they leave two years after an incident because many things have compounded to the point that they feel they can’t go on. And by that time, we’ve missed the point to intervene. Once someone’s out of work – particularly in their 40s and 50s – it’s hard to get them back. So employers need to catch people early, because often those most in need of help are also those least likely to turn up to their GP and say, “I’ve got a problem.” Employers have that duty of care.
Are some sectors worse than others when it comes to workforce mental health?
Yes. Some of the biggest challenges are in jobs that require a lot of manual labour, such as construction. These are physically demanding jobs with a culture that’s not terribly comfortable about revealing mental health challenges. The gig economy, too, has its challenges. Delivery services need a healthy workforce to function and if attrition rates are too high, they can’t keep the business going. But they rarely offer the sort of employee assistance programmes that you might see in the world of white-collar work.
Could government mandate a minimum investment in workforce wellbeing?
The problem with that is mandation gets gamed. Everyone becomes expert in reclassifying lines of spend. But you’re right: there’s been a real disappointment in the lack of tax breaks for workforce health.
It’s complex and contentious. Some people think spending on private health insurance is social injustice. I think that’s wrong-headed. There’s nothing more noble than someone trying to invest in their own health.
One thing government could do better is measurement – having good data on what workforce absence looks like, what schemes are working. That’s leadership. Not tax breaks. Not mandation. Just robust figures. I pushed for that in the government’s 10-year health plan, but it didn’t happen.
You see a lot of innovation in your advisory role, sitting on the board of several health-tech firms. What’s exciting you most?
I think AI is a game-changer for health management. It’s not a panacea but it can hugely help with decision-support. In mental health especially, it’s key – there are only around 1,000 consultant psychiatrists in the UK. But there are lots of empathetic, thoughtful people who could help if supported properly by AI.
Finally, if you were advising the Chief People Officer of a UK company right now, what would you say?
Focus on outcomes. Too much of workplace health has been about recruitment and retention – like saying, “Hey, you get subsidised David Lloyd membership.” It’s seen as a nice perk, but in reality few people use it.
The question is: how do you drive actual engagement? How do you measure the underlying health of your workforce? I visited the headquarters of McLaren a while back, which has 320 people in its F1 team and they’re peeing in cups and taking mental health questionnaires morning, noon and night. Everyone is performance optimised.
But if you’re running a 100,000-person organisation, how do you take that astronaut-level of care principle and make it affordable? If you reduce sickness absence by just one day a year per person, that’s a big productivity uplift. But many HR teams struggle to understand what impact actually looks like and creating a bespoke workplace wellbeing solution for every team member is obviously unwieldy. I believe that technology is the key here and I’m excited to see how it will help create a healthier UK workforce.
