Split your wellbeing spend in two and look at the ratio
Here is a short exercise that takes about twenty minutes and tells you more than most wellbeing reports.
Take everything your organisation spent on psychological health last year. The EAP contract. Any training. The R U OK? Day catering. Mental health first aid training. The wellbeing app nobody opens. Claims management. Return to work support. Whatever sits in the line item.
Now split it into two columns. Things that reduce exposure to harm, and things that respond once harm has occurred.
Then look at the ratio.
What most organisations find
In my experience it is heavily weighted toward the second column, and often almost entirely.
This is not because anyone decided prevention did not matter. It is because the response column is easy to buy and easy to report. A contract has a number. Utilisation has a percentage. Claims have a cost. Someone can put all of it in a board pack and it looks like management.
The prevention column is harder on every one of those measures. It is bought in pieces, it is delivered by people rather than platforms, and its success looks like nothing happening. Nobody has ever been thanked for the claim that was not lodged.
Where the pattern comes from
It is worth noticing that this is not an organisational failing so much as an inherited shape.
Look at how mental health care is funded almost anywhere. Whether the system is a national health service, a public insurance scheme or private cover, the money is generally released by the same thing: a person presenting with a problem, usually with a diagnosis attached, for a course of treatment. Some systems cap the number of sessions, some do not. The shape is the same.
It is a treatment pathway, and a valuable one. It is not, and was never designed to be, a prevention pathway. There is limited or no funding for the work that stops someone needing the referral in the first place.
The World Health Organization puts median government spending on mental health at around 2% of health budgets globally, a figure unchanged since 2017 (WHO, 2025). Prevention is a fraction of that fraction.
That is not a criticism of clinicians, of the scheme, or of anyone using it. It is a description of what a funding model is shaped to do. And funding models train expectations. If every system a person has encountered responds after the fact, then responding after the fact is what managing mental health looks like, and an organisation designing its own approach will reproduce that shape without ever deciding to.
Which is the useful part. Once you can see that the shape was inherited rather than chosen, it becomes something you can change.
What sits in the prevention column
If the column is close to empty, it is usually because prevention has been understood narrowly. It is broader than a training day.
Work design. Workload that is achievable, role clarity, decision rights, change that is explained rather than announced. The highest-order controls available, and mostly free of direct cost. What they require is management attention, which is a real currency and a scarcer one than money.
Leader capability. Whether the people closest to the work can recognise a shift in someone and respond usefully. This is the layer with the largest gap between policy and experience in most organisations.
Knowing and trusting what exists. Support that people cannot describe, or do not trust, is support that does not function. Education about what is available and how it works handles the first. The second is built by what happened to the last person who used it.
Measurement of exposure. Not how many people used the service, but what the work is doing to people. That one is genuinely hard and it is where next week's post goes.
The honest objection
The reasonable pushback here is that you cannot stop funding the response column. You cannot, and you should not. People need support, they need it now, and withdrawing it to fund prevention would be indefensible.
But that is not the choice in front of most organisations. The choice is usually what to do with the next increment, or with a contract coming up for renewal, or with an unspent line at the end of a year. And the default answer to all three is to buy more of the second column, because it is what everyone knows how to buy.
Shifting even a modest proportion toward prevention, deliberately, over a couple of cycles, is what changes the ratio. Nobody needs to do it in one step.
One thing to expect if this works: early intervention use may rise rather than fall, at least initially. When people know what exists and trust it, they reach it sooner and at a lower level of distress. A climbing utilisation rate after a genuine prevention investment is not evidence that prevention failed. It is often the first sign that the prevention is working.
Worth asking
1. What proportion of last year's psychological health spend reduced exposure to harm, rather than responding to it?
2. Of everything in the response column, how much of it was chosen, and how much was renewed because it was already there?
3. When we last increased the wellbeing budget, which column did the increase go into?
4. What would have to be true for the next budget increase to go into the prevention column?
The point
Week two of National Safe Work Month asks what work health and safety protects. A budget answers that question more honestly than a policy does, because a budget is a record of what an organisation actually decided rather than what it intended.
Split yours in two. The ratio will tell you whether you are protecting people or catching them
Stay Curious,
Genevieve
If the prevention column is thin, that is usually a capability question rather than a budget one.
This article is general information about work design and leadership capability. It is not legal advice, work health and safety advice, or clinical advice.
