Digestive health at work

Around one adult in ten lives with IBS. At work it quietly decides travel, meetings, team meals and sick days, and almost nobody says so. It gets harder for the people who travel or work shifts, where neither the timing nor the menu is theirs to choose.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which sets the clinical guidelines the NHS works to, is explicit that a low FODMAP diet should only be delivered by a healthcare professional with expertise in dietary management, and that someone whose symptoms persist after general advice should be referred to one.

That is a narrow, reserved piece of clinical work, and it is ours. The same is true of coeliac disease, food allergy, and eating around medication, travel or shift patterns.

Here the one-to-one days do most of the work. A session brings the subject into the open; the individual appointments are where a low FODMAP trial, a coeliac diagnosis or an allergy actually gets managed.

Why this and not a benefit

A benefit is always-on and passive. This is dated, it is in the room, and people turn up. It sits alongside whatever cover and platforms you already have rather than replacing them, and it does the one thing an always-on service cannot: it creates a moment your people put in the diary.

We won't quote you a productivity figure. The market runs on numbers nobody can evidence. What we will tell you is how many people came and what they asked about, and the second one is usually more useful than a percentage, because it tells you what your workforce is actually dealing with.

If your people are already covered and still asking questions nobody has answered, that is the gap this fills.