Unum expands access to Help@hand to every Life Insurance and Critical Illness customer

• The award-winning health and wellbeing app from Unum is now available to 1.4m employees — as well as their families¹
• It vastly increases the number of people with 24/7 access to virtual GP appointments, plus direct access to physiotherapy, mental health support and medical second opinions from healthcare professionals
• All new Help@hand Insights Report will also now be accessible to eligible customers, giving employers a greater understanding of their workforce’s wellbeing needs

Unum, one of the UK’s leading employee benefits providers, has now extended access to its award-winning health and wellbeing app, Help@hand, to all its Group Life and Critical Illness customers at no cost.

Help@hand provides employees with instant access to five high quality support services via one easy-to-use app. This includes unlimited remote GP appointments available 24/7, plus mental health support and physiotherapy from qualified mental health professionals and physiotherapists, all directly accessible through the app and without signposting or triage.

The rollout ensures an even larger number of employers can put their staff at the forefront of digital health and wellbeing innovation in the employee benefits space as well as help minimise workplace absence.

Feedback from Help@hand users shows how well remote healthcare services are received. Users rate the service an average of 9 out of 10 in terms of overall satisfaction. In the 6 months to December 2021, an average of 95% of users said their healthcare professional dealt with their concerns on that day within their appointment.

Help@hand’s five key health and wellbeing services will soon grow, with a new ‘sixth’ service being integrated into the app next month. This will allow users to access Unum’s Wellbeing Calendar and its year-round support from podcasts, webinars and awareness dates all targeted at improving overall health and wellbeing.

Help@hand was already available to every Unum Group Income Protection customer and, in 2021, the employee benefits provider extended the service to Life and Critical Illness customers with 250 or fewer employees to support smaller businesses who may have been struggling under lockdowns.

This latest extension means that 1.4 million employees already covered by a Unum Group Risk policy can now access Help@hand. This comes at a crucial time for businesses, who are facing a retention and recruitment crisis in the shape of the ‘Big Quit’.

Unum’s own research of small businesses found that 40% of employees would be attracted to a new employer if they had a better benefits package. The research also revealed that 21% of employees would like a benefits and support package that can be accessed anywhere to help them adapt to hybrid working.²

In addition to the extension of the Help@hand app service offering, eligible employers now have access to the Help@hand Insights Report, providing anonymised insight into the usage patterns of their employee benefits services by enabling them to identify key workforce trends such as utilisation by health issue, number of sessions used, gender, age, time of appointment and more.^*

This will allow companies to understand their pain points to shape their wellbeing strategies, services and resources to reflect their employees’ current needs.