Work from home advice ends but employee back ache lingers: Unum sees 50% jump in digital physio appointments at start of 2022

• Insights from Unum’s award-winning health and wellbeing app Help@hand point to the musculoskeletal toll from the COVID-19 pandemic on workers
• 2 in 5 digital physiotherapy appointments booked via the app are for back, neck and shoulder problems
• Demand for digital services continues to grow, with Help@hand seeing more than 3,000 app downloads at the start of 2022

Unum, one of the UK’s leading employee benefits providers, has reported a sharp rise in demand for digital physiotherapy appointments, indicating that the pandemic is continuing to take a physical toll on employees who’ve had to work from home. 

Unum’s award-winning health and wellbeing app Help@hand saw appointments surge by 50% between the end of 2021 and the start of 2022, before the lifting of the government work-from-home advice. 

The figure is the highest it has been since October and is potentially linked to bone, muscle, tendon, ligament and soft tissues pain related to working from home, whether that is through poor posture, lack of regular exercise, a poor home working ergonomic setup or another change in habits.

In the 6 months to January 2022, 97% of individuals who booked a physiotherapy appointment via Help@hand agreed that their physiotherapist dealt with their concerns on that day, a very high satisfaction rating for a service some may consider a struggle to deliver digitally.

These findings illustrate just how effective digital delivery of health and wellbeing services can be, even for a stereotypically ‘hands-on’ service such as physiotherapy.

The data from Unum also indicated a continual mental toll on workers from the pandemic, with mental health appointments increasing by 27% between December 2021 and January 2022. The good news is that Unum noted that more men were now seeking mental health support and the 26-35 age group were most proactive at this. 

Help@hand also saw a 33.39% increase in downloads from December ’21 to January ’22 — with more than 3,000 downloads made via the App Store in January. 

The growth was partly down to the fact that Help@hand is now available to 1.4m employees — as well as their families¹  — across Unum’s Group Life, Income Protection and Critical Illness customers. This follows Unum widening the service to all employees covered by any of the above schemes. Previously Help@hand was only available to employees covered by a Unum Group Income Protection policy or a Group Life or Group Critical Illness policy with fewer than 250 insured employees.

This vastly increased the number of people with access to 24/7 virtual GP appointments, plus direct in-app access to physiotherapy, mental health support and medical second opinions from healthcare professionals.

In addition to extending availability of Help@hand, employers who’ve had more than 50 employees² book a Help@hand appointment can now access to the Help@hand Insights Report.

This provides anonymised insight into employees’ Help@hand usage by health issue, number of sessions used, gender, age, time of appointment and more; so employers can identify workforce trends and adapt their wellbeing strategies to match current employee needs.