World TB Day: 4 ways workplace healthcare initiatives can create impact at scale

Tuberculosis (TB) kills more people every year than any other infectious disease. However, unlike many other infectious diseases, it predominantly affects people during their prime working years, and the highest burdens are found not only in the world’s poorest countries, but in large developing economies like India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Nigeria.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labor Organization (ILO) guidance for a healthy, TB-free workforce shows that workplace interventions can result in higher productivity and lower staff turnover and absenteeism. This reduces costs related to health care and supportive workplace interventions can benefit businesses, employees and communities.

Traditionally, however, there have been few models that show how companies should tackle TB. To address that, the World Economic Forum, along with Johnson & Johnson, the Global Fund, the Stop TB Partnership and others, launched the Ending Workplace TB (EWTB) initiative at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos in 2020.

This World TB Day marks five years since the first cohort of companies joined EWTB in March 2021 with the aim of ensuring that everyone associated with their workplaces are safe from TB. The initiative has since engaged more than 50 multinational companies and 4.6 million employees worldwide.

Here are four lessons from EWTB that other private sector-led campaign coalitions can use as a roadmap to achieve large-scale impact when deploying workplace healthcare initiatives:

Recognizing best practices and sharing lessons learned can help strengthen all members of a coalition and also support individual companies in understanding how they can continue to evolve their own programmes.

For example, EWTB’s Exemplar Award was created to recognise companies that have gone above and beyond in ensuring their workforces are safe from TB. Recipients to date include Freeport-McMoRan, Kempinski Hotels, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Parexcel, Perenco and Sibanye Stillwater.

Companies can have a greater impact when working together to develop solutions than when working individually. In fact, EWTB has used examples of individual programmes to influence a broader movement on workplace health and TB. This has contributed to a directive from the Indonesian Ministry of Manpower requiring all Indonesian companies to take measures to tackle TB in their workplaces.

Corporate health and wellness teams have incredibly rich and detailed knowledge – not just in their area of expertise, but also on their companies and workforces.

EWTB sought to allow space for each company to use this knowledge to devise their own ways of creating workplace TB interventions. Results included using TB as an example of a cause for prejudice in workplace inclusion programmes and enabling employees to access quality care onsite.

A clear strategy can help to assess when initiatives are fulfilling their goals and objectives and when it may be time to move on. In its early stages, for example, EWTB focused on raising awareness of TB within workplace dynamics as part of broader health and safety initiatives, with a gradual shift toward enabling systemic change.

Pivots can ensure relevancy. For example, exploring broader integration of lung health into existing TB programmes.

Companies can now seek out all kinds of models of care and prevention using the integrated healthcare approaches like those that EWTB has developed.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have also led to a plethora of health-related tools that could allow for integrated workplace screenings. In many countries, employers are required to provide annual health screenings for employees and such tools can increase companies’ ability to provide a one-stop shop. In the case of TB prevention, for example, AI tools can help to screen employees for TB alongside a range of other diseases such as lung cancer.

Establishing solid, evidence-based policy recommendations for workplace healthcare interventions creates a pathway for every worker, everywhere, to benefit from multi-modal screening in their workplace. This is a crucial next step in the global journey to ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all under the “Good Health and Wellbeing” UN Sustainable Development Goal.