Flu shot rewards – Use gift cards and vouchers as incentives to protect vulnerable patients

Flu season starts in October, every year. But if you have medically vulnerable staff, or staff that interact with vulnerable people, your flu season starts a bit earlier. You need to prepare a flu shot reward to incentivise staff to take up their jabs.

Leave it too late, and you’ll be well into flu season before you try to catch your staff up on their jabs.

Why you should offer flu shot rewards

Cost of flu to medical workforces

Cold and flu alone cost hospital and community health services 325,305 days of work in the winter of 2016-17. In a four-month period between November and February, some trusts saw more than a hundred working days lost just among their nursing and health visitor staff. [1]

Absent staff cost you money when they can’t work. Even worse, many sick employees come in and create sick departments through presenteeism.

Sick departments suffer in performance and increased stress in every business. This is even worse in a medical environment where your staff support vulnerable patients.

There’s a three-pronged crisis caused by the flu:

• Your staff pass flu among themselves and on to patients
• Your patients become more difficult to care for when suffering flu
• A sick and understaffed team struggle to care for patients that need extra attention

Minimising the risk of this problem is as simple as making sure staff get their flue jabs. To make sure they take up the offer, offer them an exciting reward as incentive.

A 2018 report from NICE concluded that incentives prove popular among staff. They also noted that expert testimony support NICE’s recommendations to increase flu jab uptake. That included offering incentives to employees. [2]

Outside a medical environment

Flu shot rewards aren’t just useful for medical teams.  You may have employees with immune systems issues. Or a vulnerable condition like asthma, COPD or diabetes. You might also have pregnant staff, or workers over the age of 65.

Flu is dangerous for vulnerable employees, and could put them out of action for a long time. And just like in a medical environment, you don’t want a team beleaguered with flu picking up the slack either.

You want your employees coming into work, and coming in healthy. What you lose with a flu-ridden staff is considerably more than what you’d spend on organising work flu jabs and offering flu shot rewards.

Overcoming natural malaise

We know your staff aren’t callous about your vulnerable patients. Or deliberately spreading their flu microbes. But they are busy as anyone else. A tantalising reward punches through the fog of daily life and your staff a reason to take part in a new scheme.

Rewards light a fire under your employees. Thousands of businesses get their staff motivated by using our rewards every year. We know they work when it comes to getting someone moving. If you want to push people into action, you need to give them a reason to move.

How to manage your flu incentive

Our clients tend to fall into two broad categories. Spread a budget out over your staff as individual rewards, or put all the funds in one place as a lottery. Which one you choose depends on the needs of your staff.

Know your workforce, and consider your budget. When you have less staff, you might generally consider yourself as having a smaller reward budget.

But at the same time, a small team is even more affected by sickness. It’s a balancing act depending on your business’ needs. If you’re unsure about which way to go, get in touch. Our team is always happy to talk.

Plan and promote your flu shot rewards

Name it and promote it. Our other clients have given their anti-flu campaigns funky names like Flu Fighters (get it?).

Make sure you communicate the value of the jab, and the value of the reward. Getting out ahead of the actual jab itself is important. You want staff that see why they should take the flu jab well ahead of time. And be fired about what they can do with their rewards.

The sooner you start planning, the more effective your flu shot reward campaign is likely to be. As ever, if you need anything, you can find us on phone, email or the live chat on this site.

References:

• [1]https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/find-data-and-publications/supplementary-information/2018-supplementary-information-files/staff-absence/days-lost-due-to-sickness-absence-for-cough-cold-and-influenza-in-england-november-2016-to-february-2017
• [2]https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng103/resources/flu-vaccination-increasing-uptake-pdf-66141536272837