Inside GreenShield's mental health initiatives

As he surveys the mental health landscape in Canada and the stubborn stigmas that persist, Joe Blomeley says there’s been a build-up of pressure in the system that requires a ‘relief valve.’ The executive vice-president and head of health services and enterprise growth at GreenShield believes that relief valve consists of a coherent, thoughtful and well-funded mental health strategy that includes the public and private community in an integrated fashion. But organizations need to be committed to such strategies.

“There's a greater willingness to talk about mental health now, and people are more open about their mental health challenges,” he said. “The funding, availability of programs and the accessibility of programs still remains fairly low though so there’s a long way to go.”

With a greater openness within organizations to talk about mental health, Blomeley says, more organizations should consider putting a concrete and fully developed mental health strategy in the workplace. He is quick to point out far too many organizations don't have a strategy that identify employees within the organization’s structure that have lived experiences of mental health or who are measuring the return of investment in mental health services. However, compared to a decade ago, “we're much further ahead than we were,” he added.

Blomeley says that there are several ways to improve the mental health crisis in Canada. For one, organizations should start by looking internally to the programs they have currently that are seeing the best results, Blomeley highlighted. “You want to focus on the most efficient and effective offerings,” he highlighted. “You want to make sure that your leadership team is promoting the services you have available, and employees are actually talking about their experiences of accessing these services and how they've improved their respective lives.”

One of the resources employers and employees alike should be utilizing is their respective Employee Assistance Plan (EAP). Another strategy organizations should pay special attention to is their return of investment for mental health services. Blomeley points to a Deloitte study from 2022 that found Canadian companies who invested in mental health programs for their employees for at least a year “experienced a median annual return on investment of about $1.62 for every dollar they spent,” Blomeley noted. “If you invest in mental health and provide access to your employees, it will improve productivity, reduce absenteeism, and create a more efficient and effective worker.”

Ultimately, aggressive utilization, a willingness to look beyond traditional providers who are implementing innovative strategies and leveraging technology will be important for organizations to improve mental health in the workplace, Blomeley added.

Since joining GreenShield in 2019, Blomeley has helped lead the company through significant growth. At the end of the pandemic, they acquired Inkblot Therapy, a mental health digital platform, leveraging their services across GreenShield’s health offerings. Since then, GreenShield has doubled revenue every year. “When you look at our mental health services, we’re one of the fourth largest providers of private mental health services in the country. That includes EAP and I-CBT as well as a variety of preventative care solutions,” Blomeley highlighted.

GreenShield is seeing this growth through their utilization data around mental health services and their EAP that is offered employers. In the past, where utilization has sat between 3 to 5 percent of employees using mental health services, Blomeley highlighted, that number is now much higher, sitting at ten to fifteen percent of utilization. What makes GreenShield attractive for their mental health service offerings to organizations is their leverage of technology, Blomeley says.

“Because we're able to reach right into our clinical network and access physicians’ calendars,” he says. “Organizations that have our services and make them available to their employees tend to get access to these services in a much quicker and efficient manner than if you went through the publicly funded system.”

Through GreenShield’s regional mental health solution, employees can access a therapist between one and four days. According to Blomeley, the national average wait time for a private counsellor in Canada is 31 days. Through the publicly funded system, wait times can be anywhere between six to 12 months, “depending on which urban area or province you're currently living in,” he said. “We're improving accessibility and affordability; we're seeing more people use these services but there's still ways to go of better integrating these services into what's being offered to the vast majority of Canadians.”

Blomeley's journey into the mental health sector stems from a personal mission to prevent others from facing the struggles he experienced in early adulthood. He envisions a future where mental health care in Canada is seamlessly integrated across public, non-profit, and private sectors. “If we truly want to crack the nut and improve how mental health care is delivered in this country, we need to start having those conversations between the publicly funded system, the community funded system and private providers. There needs to be an opportunity to integrate these services,” he asserts.

As an example, he emphasizes the need for provincial governments to collaborate with organizations like GreenShield to extend effective employer-funded mental health services to a broader population. “There are innovative programs and a lot of research showing what works, but nobody’s talking to each other,” said Blomeley. “Having those initial conversations about how to build a system in this country and better integrate what's offered, with a focus on the patient and health outcomes, would be a dream of mine.”