Corporate Bone Health Screening for Employers: Why It Belongs in Workplace Wellbeing

Why should bone health be part of workplace wellbeing?

Because bone health quietly shapes your workforce's ability to stay at work — and it is one of the few big absence drivers that responds well to early, preventative action. Most wellbeing programmes already cover mental health, musculoskeletal aches and lifestyle. Bone health sits inside that same picture, but it rarely gets its own attention because it produces no symptoms until something breaks.

The scale is significant. Musculoskeletal conditions — a category that includes osteoporosis — are the single biggest contributor to work days lost in the UK, at 15.5% of the total. Royal Osteoporosis Society, 2025 More broadly, an estimated 3.5 million people in the UK have osteoporosis, and it causes more than 500,000 fragility fractures every year. Royal Osteoporosis Society

The reason this matters for employers is timing. Osteoporosis develops silently over years, then presents suddenly as a fracture — often a wrist, spine or hip break from a minor bump or fall. NOGG, 2024 By the time it shows up as absence, the window for cheap, simple prevention has already closed. Screening is what moves the conversation upstream, while diet, exercise and clinical follow-up can still make the most difference.

How much does poor bone health cost employers?

The direct workplace cost of osteoporotic fractures runs into the hundreds of millions of pounds a year — before you count the wider strain on teams, cover and productivity. The Royal Osteoporosis Society, responding to ONS sickness-absence data, estimates that over 57,000 osteoporotic fractures occur each year among employed people in England, that businesses lose around 1.5 million work days a year to them, and that this could be costing UK employers in the region of £129 million a year in sick days. Royal Osteoporosis Society, 2025

Zoom out to the whole health and social care system and the numbers grow further: fragility fractures cost the UK over £4.5 billion a year, of which hip fractures alone account for about £2 billion. Royal Osteoporosis Society

Why does menopause make bone health a workplace issue?

Because menopause typically arrives during peak working years, and it is one of the fastest periods of bone loss in adult life. The Royal Osteoporosis Society explains that at menopause the oestrogen that keeps bone density stable decreases, so bone density and strength fall and fracture risk rises — with change happening more rapidly in the decade after periods stop. Royal Osteoporosis Society

For employers, this connects bone health directly to the menopause and women's-health support many organisations are already building. A large share of any mixed-age workforce is in or approaching this life stage, and on-site screening lets those employees understand where their bones stand early — when lifestyle changes and, where appropriate, clinical referral can do the most good. It is a natural, evidence-based addition to an existing menopause policy rather than a separate initiative.

What happens at a Screen My Bones corporate assessment day?

Screen My Bones brings a mobile "assessment day" pop-up to your workplace, so your team is scanned on-site with no travel and no clinic appointment. The model is built around convenience: we come to you, set up in a room on your premises, and work through employees across the day. You can see how the format works on our assessment days page.

The scan itself uses REMS (radiofrequency echographic multi-spectrometry) — a radiation-free ultrasound method of assessing bone health, which the research literature describes as a portable, non-ionising tool well suited to on-site assessment. Diagnostics (Basel), MDPI, 2025 Each person receives a quick, comfortable assessment followed by personalised results and clear guidance on what their bone health means and what steps they can take next.

To be clear about what this is and isn't: Screen My Bones does not use DEXA or X-rays, and does not measure body composition or body fat. This is a focused bone health assessment, designed to give employees a meaningful, radiation-free reading of their bone health and practical next steps.

How is a REMS bone scan different from a hospital DEXA scan?

REMS assesses bone using ultrasound rather than the low-dose X-rays used by DEXA, which means no ionising radiation and equipment portable enough to come to your site. That combination is what makes workplace screening at scale practical in the first place — you can't easily bring a fixed hospital DEXA scanner into an office.

On accuracy, a 2025 systematic review in the journal Diagnostics reported diagnostic concordance between REMS and DXA of around 88.8% (Cohen's kappa 0.824), alongside a fragility score with strong fracture-prediction ability. Diagnostics (Basel), MDPI, 2025 Agreement can vary between patient groups, so REMS is best understood as a convenient, radiation-free way to assess bone health at scale — not a like-for-like replacement for every clinical DEXA indication. Where a formal diagnostic pathway is needed, a person's results can inform a conversation with their GP.

Which employers and organisations is this most relevant for?

It suits any employer with an ageing or predominantly female workforce, plus the benefits providers and insurers building preventative health into their offer. The population-level risk is substantial: around 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men over 50 will experience an osteoporotic fracture, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation. International Osteoporosis Foundation The Royal Osteoporosis Society frames the UK picture as half of women and 20% of men over 50 breaking a bone because of osteoporosis. Royal Osteoporosis Society

The clearest fit tends to be:

• Employers with older or long-tenured teams, where a larger share of staff sit in the higher-risk age bands.
• Organisations already investing in menopause and women's-health support, for whom bone screening is a natural extension of existing programmes.
• Benefits providers, insurers and occupational-health partners looking to add a genuinely preventative, radiation-free screening option to their portfolio — the focus of our become a partner route.

Prevention advice, meanwhile, is consistent and achievable at work: NOGG frames it around a healthy diet, adequate calcium and vitamin D, weight-bearing and muscle-strengthening exercise, not smoking, and FRAX-based risk assessment for postmenopausal women and men over 50. NOGG, 2024 A screening day gives employees the personal starting point that makes that general advice concrete.

How do you bring bone health screening to your team?

The simplest next step is to talk to us about an on-site assessment day for your organisation. We'll help you understand the format, who benefits most in your workforce, and how results and guidance reach your people — with no fixed-clinic visit required.

You can enquire about becoming a partner or get in touch to arrange a corporate assessment day. Bone health is one of the few workplace-health areas where acting early, before symptoms appear, genuinely changes the outcome — and an on-site screening day is the most direct way to give your team that head start.

---

This article is part of our screening technology series. To understand how radiation-free REMS compares with DEXA in more depth, start there.