Only a decade ago, having a gym inside your office building in the UK would have felt like a real luxury. It was a perk that was mostly enjoyed by banks and workplaces in the City, but it is now something that employers are investing in all over the country, particularly in major cities. Spurred on by a growing number of people who are placing their health and wellbeing as a priority, it is the same employers who are now taking this a step further and rethinking what they offer on healthcare too.
Employers now account for around 85% of private medical insurance in the UK, and, traditionally, the remaining 15% was bought by retirees. Now, however, that group is becoming families in their thirties and forties, which is a shift Christian Mueller, Chief Commercial Officer of Primary & Urgent Care at HCA Healthcare UK has watched play out from the provider’s side. Paying for a private GP, he told me, “was something that had been tipping upwards, but that has flattened out this year, potentially driven by rising living costs.” Having said that, he explained that the picture looks different from the corporate end, where he has noticed “significant uptake among smaller, more boutique brands.”
“Bupa, Nuffield Health and HCA aren’t introducing the idea of workplace health to that population so much as extending it, adding primary care and diagnostics to a list of benefits people already expect.”
Underpinning that broader shift is a fairly simple piece of logic – most people spend the majority of their waking hours at work, so their GP should also be there.
Speaking to Chris Bailey, Director of Corporate & Primary Care at Nuffield Health, he agreed that it makes sense for primary care to belong near the office for exactly that reason, while anything invasive or requiring proper recovery time is better handled closer to home, particularly now that hybrid working is generally the norm. Nuffield Health’s clinic in Canary Wharf was built around that very distinction, offering GP appointments, dermatology and pathology close enough that employees can step away from their desks for twenty minutes and be back within their lunch break.
Bupa is doing something similar with its own health centre in Canary Wharf, bringing dentists, GPs and consultants together under one roof for the roughly 120,000 people who live and work nearby. The fact that it is also located in Canary Wharf says something about how this trend is unfolding. Canary Wharf has spent the last decade building the exact culture this model depends on: a workforce already used to on-site gyms, wellness apps and health screenings wrapped in alongside their jobs. Bupa, Nuffield Health and HCA aren’t introducing the idea of workplace health to that population so much as extending it, adding primary care and diagnostics to a list of benefits people already expect. If workplace healthcare can demonstrate its value here, where the appetite and the infrastructure already exist, it becomes a template that other cities and other types of employers can use.
“What makes that particularly notable is how directly the clinical and fitness sides now feed into one another: a health assessment can lead straight into a free gym membership and ongoing coaching, so the same site that diagnoses a problem is also the one that helps put it right.”
So what does scaling look like in reality? For Nuffield Health, at least, it has meant looking at what it already owns rather than building from scratch. Its fitness sites, Chris points out, “tend to be in urban areas that are easy to reach with a strong population draw,” which is why nearly 90% of the UK population lives within 20 miles of one of its facilities. “Rather than building new clinics in each city, the more sensible answer is to use that existing real estate,” he told me, adding that a number of its centres already have clinical space built in, since they were “truly multi-purpose locations” long before this trend took hold. What makes that particularly notable is how directly the clinical and fitness sides now feed into one another: a health assessment can lead straight into a free gym membership and ongoing coaching, so the same site that diagnoses a problem is also the one that helps put it right.
HCA has taken a slightly different approach, staying largely London-centric, although it is now broadening out to areas like Manchester and Birmingham, which is driven in part by corporates moving staff around the country. In short, Christian told me: “We follow our clients and their employees because they want that service.”
“We follow our clients and their employees because they want that service.”
Stemming from its American background where much of the healthcare journey is centred around continuity, fertility has become something of a test case for that philosophy. In May 2026, HCA opened a fertility satellite clinic (an extension of its Lister Fertility Clinic in Chelsea) inside its already successful Canary Wharf centre. Christian explained: “We are saying to our corporate clients and existing patients, that if they want the full pathway, come to us.” The ex-pats living in London expect access to specialists such as Paediatricians alongside their GP, which is a level of continuity that has not yet taken hold in the UK’s private consumer market. “Part of our job,” Christian added, “is to show the cities we operate in, that a different level of product exists.”
Taken together, what all of this points to is a shift in how healthcare is being packaged. Increasingly, choosing a provider looks more like choosing a gym, or a bank, or any other service brand: on convenience, on experience, and on whether the whole journey feels joined up from first appointment to last. Nuffield Health offering a health assessment alongside a gym membership, Bupa building a health centre designed around footfall rather than referral, HCA promising a single continuous pathway rather than a one-off appointment – each is a version of the same idea, that patients are beginning to be treated, and starting to behave, like customers.
Between a growing sense in these post-covid years that a healthy workforce is a prosperous one, the openings of clinics still to come, a work culture edging back towards the office, and a growing emphasis on preventative health, there is plainly more still to come for the consumer. Perhaps in ten years, healthcare clinics in office buildings may well be as ordinary a sight as gyms are today.
