Toespraak van minister Asscher bij de afsluiting van het OECD high-level policy forum on mental health and work

Toespraak | 04-03-2015

Ladies and gentlemen,

Today’s forum addressed important issues regarding mental ill-health. Yet the forum also aimed at addressing and curing one important 'physical' problem. It’s not a problem any of us has suffered from personally. Or so I hope. Yet it is a physical problem that is inevitable in complex organizations, corporations, and domains that have to work together. It’s the problem of 'the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing…'. A real 'pain in the neck', indeed!

In most OECD countries, both employment and health systems continue to operate in isolation. This conference aimed at ensuring that all the left hands in health care and the right hands in employment orchestrate their actions. By doing so, they can help workers with mental ill-health to keep and find quality jobs more easily. The number of key ‘left and right hands’ here today shows that we are on the right track. Today’s meaningful discussions assure me that we are making progress on this track, too!

And this progress is very important. The issue of mental health has increasingly become a problem we need to face. We have been ignoring symptoms for too long, as the OECD review shows. This is also the case in the Netherlands. Take for example the fact that since the turn of the century we have witnessed more and more young people applying for disability benefits. At one point, almost one in twenty people aged 18 was doing so. This is just one of many symptoms of a problem we can no longer ignore. The costs of mental-health issues are simply too high. For society, for employers, and most importantly, for workers themselves, who suffer in many ways.

That's why it’s time to act now on mental health. More specifically, we need to act upon the causal relationship between employment and health. Upon the fact that health is a key labour market barrier. And that work is a key health accelerator.

The OECD has effectively put this issue on the agenda and has provided us with guidance on how to act now:

• We need to intervene earlier in all our systems, including schools and workplaces, rather than offering help when people drop out of the labour market.
• We need to develop much better integrated health and employment policies and interventions.
• And we need to better involve and build up the competence of front-line actors.

I fully support these conclusions. Indeed, for workers, both occupational healthcare and regular healthcare play important roles. Mental ill-health needs to be signalled as soon as possible. And there needs to be a focused approach for recovery and reintegration.

This is what I aim to accomplish in the Netherlands, too. Together with Minister Schippers, my counterpart from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports, I recently announced measures to improve the performance of occupational healthcare.

Soon, people will get better access to occupational healthcare. All employees will be able to consult their occupational doctor about work-related health concerns. Now, they tend to meet their occupational doctor when they are already ill.

In the Netherlands there are guidelines for the treatment of patients with mental ill-health. These guidelines aim for instance at ensuring that employees with mental problems start with reintegration in good time. However, as the OECD points out in its report, stakeholders only follow these guidelines to a certain extent. There is room for improvement here. Hence the government stimulates the cooperation between occupational doctors and general practitioners concerning healthcare problems.

I am glad to see that today’s forum also addressed the problem of the stigma of mental ill-health. It is of the utmost importance that the silence around this taboo subject is broken. While work can act like a medicine, this medicine can also become the poison, if we are not careful! Indeed, work-related stress is the biggest occupational hazard in the Netherlands. The first step is to break the silence. Workers and employers need to signal the problem and talk openly about it, as workers can deal with stress better when they receive support from colleagues or their employer. It also helps when people are able to arrange their working conditions themselves, and when they have the right skills to do the job.

Last year, we launched a 4-year national campaign aimed at creating awareness for this issue amongst workers and employers. The campaign aims at sharing best practices and personal stories. And so far it has been a success. More than two thirds of Dutch employees find the campaign useful to them. It is a good example of acting upon the causal relationship between health care and work.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to act now. With the policy framework provided in the synthesis report, the OECD has given us the right tools. And I hope it will be able to assist its member countries in the future. I can imagine that the OECD is willing to develop the policy framework further, to make it an even stronger tool for policy makers.

Now, it’s no longer a question of whether, but only of how, to proceed. We need to put both our left and right hands to work for people with mental ill-health. Not only for their recovery, but also in order for them to keep their jobs. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not an apple a day that keeps the doctor away. It's work! Employment is the best remedy for workers, for their employers and for society.

Thank you.