"When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I must go"

“I’ve been researching this subject for many years, and the evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore. We may be living longer, but we are also spending more of those years in poorer health — and that has consequences for employers.

When an employee’s health begins to deteriorate, the impact doesn’t stop with the individual. It can appear in energy, performance, absence, presenteeism, mistakes, resilience and ultimately the capacity of the business itself.

The question is: do we wait until somebody becomes ill enough to leave work, or get better at recognising the warning signs much earlier?”

Background: Engineering | Commercial & Project Management | Business Consultancy | Health & Wellbeing

Professional Qualifications: Engineering | Project Management | Commercial Law

Health & Wellbeing Training: 

• Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis - Karen Tait
• Live Blood Analysis & Oxidative Stress Testing - Dr Okker Botha
• FoodMarble Clinical Partner - FoodMarble
• Advanced Clearing Energetics - Richard Flook
• Stress & Wellbeing Assessment Provider - HeartMath Institute
• HeartMath Coaching - HeartMath Institute
• Art & Science of Self-Healing - Lifestyle Prescriptions University 
• Self-Harm & Suicide Awareness & Prevention - North Hertfordshire College
• The Sedona Method - Hale Dwoskin
• The Journey - Brandon Bays
• Bowen Therapy - David Howells
• Soul Empowerment & Healing - Michael Bradford

Human Behaviour & Personal Development

• DISC Profiling - Elaine Godley
• The Ennegram - Karen Webb
• The Goddess Within - Roger Woolger
• Shamanic Studies - Leslie Kenton

Professional Memberships:

• Complementary Medical Association
• IOH - The Association of Occupational Health & Wellbeing Professionals
• The Association of Project Management

Achievements:

• Finalist for Innovation from The Complementary Medical Association
• Significant functional improvements observed in a family member living with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis while supporting him through a person-centred, integrative approach
• First Woman to be Awarded the Sir Monty Finniston Award for Project Management
• First Woman to build a Westfield Lotus Seven-style kit car
• Finalist for Young Woman Engineer of The Year Award

" This is a legacy business for me. There has to be dent where someone has been in life, and this is my mine "

Biography

Karen Simmons is the founder and Managing Director of Employee Health 360, a UK-based proactive healthcare company focused on identifying the early signs of declining health and resilience before they develop into more significant problems. 

Karen’s journey into health began with her own battle against debilitating health challenges, culminating in her planning her own funeral when she was just 29. With the help of a private Integrative Doctor, extensive personal exploration and a determination to understand what was happening, her health improved significantly— leaving her with an enduring curiosity about why health deteriorates and what enables it to recover.

With a background in blue-chip engineering and Project Management, Karen became fascinated by Ilya Prigogine’s work on Dissipative Structures and began considering whether principles from complex systems might offer a useful way of thinking about human health. Given that the human body could itself be regarded as a collection of complex, interconnected systems, she began to question whether some signs of “disease” might represent the body’s response to a system under sustained load. If that load could be identified and reduced, could the system regain its capacity to reorganise and move towards wellness?

An opportunity to explore that thinking arose in 2019, when a family member living with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (PPMS) was admitted into a Care Home after becoming severely disabled. Driven by curiosity and compassion for what appeared to be a hopeless situation, not unlike her own years earlier, Karen began supporting him using the person-centred, integrative approach she had developed by bringing together insights, methodologies and experience from across her health and wellbeing work. During that period, he experienced remarkable functional improvements, including improvements in continence, speech and mobility. His neurological condition was subsequently documented as improving and his level of disability was reclassified.

The experience profoundly influenced Karen’s thinking. It reinforced her belief in looking at the individual as a whole and strengthened a question that would ultimately lead to Employee Health 360: what if we became much better at recognising a person moving from wellness towards illness much earlier in the process?

Today, that question is evolving further. Karen’s work increasingly explores health through the lens of adaptive capacity — considering the interaction between energy, stress, flow and the resources available to an individual to meet the demands placed upon them. Her current work also explores how information from health assessments, biomarkers, lifestyle data and emerging technologies might be brought together to identify meaningful patterns earlier.

With the development of artificial intelligence creating new possibilities for understanding complex health data, Karen is now exploring how AI might responsibly support this work — not as a replacement for human judgement, but as a tool for recognising connections and patterns that might otherwise be missed.

The principle underpinning Employee Health 360 remains deceptively simple:

“Health is the capacity to adapt to change.”