{"id":934092,"date":"2026-10-15T15:36:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/934092\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T15:36:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:36:14","slug":"health-related-barriers-to-employment-costing-canada-more-than-100-billion-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/934092\/","title":{"rendered":"Health-related barriers to employment costing Canada more than $100 billion: report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read: 30% of Canadian employees say mental health negatively impacting productivity: survey<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

The report found of that lost $100 billion in productivity, $55.1 was associated with morbidity, including time away from work due to illness, while $48.5 billion in lost labour income was tied to unpaid caregiving responsibilities and another $1.1 billion was lost due to premature mortality during the period required to replace and train workers.\n<\/p>\n

It also identified two major opportunities to improve outcomes: the prevention gap, reflecting capacity lost to preventable illness; and the participation gap, reflecting capacity constrained by chronic disease, mental-health challenges and caregiving responsibilities.\u00a0By reducing caregiving burdens and morbidity-related impacts by 25 per cent each, the report argued these measures could each generate roughly $12 billion and $13 billion in economic gains, respectively.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know one in four adult Canadians is living with a chronic disease and, in many cases, we just haven\u2019t assessed the impact of this on workforce productivity,\u201d she says. \u201cKnowing that there are opportunities to prevent or slow the [impact] is, I think, extremely important.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

To illustrate the impact of caregiving support, Theroux cites her own family\u2019s experience. \u201cMy dad had dementia and I had to take time off to figure out his caregiving support while my mom had to retire early. There was just a lot of impact on everybody.\n<\/p>\n

Read: Sounding Board: Are employee benefits improving health and productivity?<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are decreases in absenteeism when [an employer has] a caregiver benefit associated with care coordination and navigating health care for that family member. There are also companies that have increased access to [personal support workers] for employees. These interventions are all focused on making sure that an individual can stay and participate in the workforce.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employers can also support these measures by taking a preventative approach to long-term disability through their benefits plans, says Theroux, noting many plan sponsors are looking beyond employee assistance programs and evaluating what resources can best support workers before they need to go on leave.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [EAPs] play a valuable role, but they\u2019re almost designed to respond when somebody reaches out, as opposed to being designed to prevent that call in the first place. . . . Forty per cent of long-term disability claims are associated with mental health and you can imagine how far that person was along in their mental-health journey before they filed an LTD claim.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an opportunity to move upstream to create conditions so people don\u2019t get that far on that journey. We\u2019ve seen certain companies promote upskilling and training of managers to better equip them in supporting team members with mental health, expanding things like psychological care benefits and having structured supports for the return to work.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Read: 19% of lost working time due to health-related employee productivity issues: survey<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Read: 30% of Canadian employees say mental health negatively impacting productivity: survey The report found of that lost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":934093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24574,49,48,320346,246017,157052,24572,24569,148,36006,4216,320345,393,99586,120698,44,24016],"class_list":["post-934092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-absence-management","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-caregiving-benefits","tag-disability-management","tag-eap","tag-employee-productivity","tag-employee-well-being","tag-health-wellness","tag-health-benefits","tag-human-resources","tag-long-term-disability","tag-mental-health","tag-mental-health-benefits","tag-mental-health-training","tag-news","tag-return-to-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/934093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}