Amid an ageing workforce, it’s important for employers to highlight preventative care, focus on wealth building and look beyond standard clauses, says Jennifer Schmidt, partner and health and benefits expert at Mercer Canada.

Many plan sponsors think of traditional benefits in a silo, but the reality is that health needs have changed, she adds. “When private insurance evolved to sit on top of the public system, it was focused on acute care . . . on episodic health issues and hospitals. Medical studies were primarily done on men. If you think about the [increased focus] on women’s health in the past few years, that wasn’t happening when group insurance programs evolved in [the 1960s and 1970s].”

Today, employees are dealing with varying issues like financial stress, caregiving pressures and climate anxiety — factors that traditional insurance programs weren’t........

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