The IFoA Wellness and Prevention Working Party gives an overview of the prevention landscape and explores the insurance industry’s involvement in the UK.
Preventive wellness has been an increasingly important topic in society and within the health and care industry.
In the UK, this growing awareness reflects the range of health-related challenges facing the public:
The NHS runs a number of prevention programmes, including cancer screenings, health check-ups, diabetes prevention programmes, and other programmes that aim at reducing chronic diseases.
While several studies have suggested these programmes would help improve population health, their effectiveness depends on the take-up rates.
For example, the NHS Health Check programme (which includes blood pressure measurement, blood tests and various checks) aims to prevent future risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and dementia. However, the take-up rates have been low and have been reducing from 48.8% for the period 2014/2015 to 37.5% for the period 2024/2025.
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan specifies prevention as a priority, but it has failed to allocate funding for prevention. It’s questionable how the shift from treatment to prevention would take place in practice.
The Keep Britain Working Review was published in 2025 with the objective of tackling long-term health issues among the working population through workplace prevention and rehabilitation reforms. The reform is now at the pilot stage (runs for 3 years until 2029) with a number of employers; it will be several years from the general adoption (from 2030) of the new approaches before we can see the impact on population health.
For protection and health insurers, many have seen a marked increase in mental health-related claims and chronic disease-related claims such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In response to this, insurers have increased their investments in value-added services, and most insurers now offer these services as part of their insurance product benefits. Common value-added services are used across the industry: virtual GP services, second medical opinions, remote physiotherapy, annual health check-ups and mental health support.
In addition, some insurers have implemented their own wellness programmes. For example, Vitality rewards its members for meeting the wellness targets, and some Insurtech firms have gamified their wellness offerings to try to encourage usage. Some firms have tried to tailor their offerings to a particular group, for example, the suboptimal risk group. Reinsurers, on the other hand, have been exploring ways to include wellness factors in underwriting and other parts of the product life cycle. For instance, RGA has recently published a study suggesting that resting heart rate can be used as a predictor of mortality. With the advancement of wearables and AI technology, there’s no doubt insurers will leverage these for their wellness and prevention offerings.
A few questions arise from the current offerings by insurers:
Do these services actually reduce mortality and illness and improve quality of life?
Each of the wellness offerings would have different impacts. Although some insurers have attempted to show how their programmes would reduce lapse/mortality/morbidity risks, most are unclear about the impacts on their book due to the lack of credible data and the early stage of these interventions.
For the most deprived population, where prevention can be the most impactful, they are less likely to have insurance cover due to affordability and are less likely to use value-added services even if they have cover. Insurers should reach out to this population group, and they will also need to ensure their wellness offerings are not widening inequalities.
Do the policyholders understand the wellness offerings?
Studies have shown that the majority of the policyholders, particularly those with protection policies, are not aware of the value-added benefits they are entitled to.
This has certainly undermined the effectiveness of these services.
Do the wellness offerings cover a holistic view of the customers’ prevention needs?
Wellness can be defined in relation to a wide range of activities and lifestyles, including physical, mental, nutrition, social, financial, spiritual, intellectual and environmental.
Physical wellness and mental wellness have been the focal areas for protection and health insurers, given the preventative impacts and the relevance to traditional insurance products.
Prevention of other wellness is closely linked to physical and mental wellness; for example, some health problems could be prevented by encouraging social wellness and helping people stay connected.
Some insurers have included bereavement support as part of their value-added services, but in general, more could be done in relation to wellness, other than physical and mental wellness.
Over the past year and a half, the IFoA’s Wellness and Prevention Working Party has been speaking with a number of protection and health insurers and reinsurers to get an insight into the current wellness and prevention approaches taken in the market.
These interviews have been conducted with experts across different fields within the industry, including actuarial, pricing, product proposition, distribution, underwriting, data science and behavioural science. The findings from these interviews highlight the wellness and prevention opportunities that would add value to insurers and the challenges that insurers are facing.
We have also been researching how prevention, as in the following pillars, can improve population health and wellness and add value across the insurance value chain:
In the next few months, we intend to share several blogs to publish our findings. We are always keen to hear from members of the IFoA and the wider insurance industry.
Please get in touch with us at Professional.communities@actuaries.org.uk if you have any wellness and prevention insights to share.
