The staggering cost of diabetes to your business

Diabetes is costing the NHS £10bn a year and is estimated to cost the wider UK economy £23.7bn every year. How much is diabetes costing your business?

Fact: Depending on the age, ethnicity and sedentary nature of your work force somewhere around 5-10% of them have diabetes (though 25% won’t know it). Let’s use 7.5%.

Fact:  A study by CDC shows that people with diabetes take 0.9-5.7 more sick days per year. This might be due to the long list of horrendous complexities, plus we’re three times more likely to have depression and we’re just way more susceptible to everything from a common cold through to cancer. Let’s go with 3 days.

Fact: Sick days have a direct cost. Obviously it varies greatly depending on the salaries and knock-on lost productivity. I going to use £500/sick day

So the average cost per employee £112.50 per year.

Say you got 10,000 reasonably healthy employees that's over a million quid. If you’re a big software or telco with 100,000 employees, averaging a little older, higher salaries, generally desk based, deeply integrated into critical projects and partial to donuts then how does that look?

100,000 people * 10% * 3 days * £1,000/day = £30m, a year. Ouch.

But that’s only half the story…..

If you’re paying health insurance then you can expect to see those premiums double.

Then there is lost productivity. People with diabetes are often more stressed, tired and depressed and so their productivity suffers and so too for all the people around them.

The American Diabetes Association estimates that American businesses loses $5bn a year in additional sick days and further $20.8bn in lost productivity all due to diabetes.

Staggering.