The war in Ukraine has led to professional burnout and the exacerbation of chronic diseases becoming a mass phenomenon among the population. According to experts, if urgent measures are not taken to adapt working conditions, the country risks losing a significant portion of its working-age potential.
Bohdan Bozhuk, General Director of the Y.I. Kundiev Institute of Occupational Medicine, stated in an interview with RBC-Ukraine that the current situation requires employers to implement special working conditions. Currently, there is no unified standard for adapting to wartime realities in the country: while some companies hire psychologists and switch to a remote format, others continue to practice forced overtime work.
The Economics of Health: Why Caring for Employees Benefits Business
The expert emphasizes that employers often mistakenly believe that time spent at the workplace directly affects the result. On the contrary, overload reduces efficiency. Bozhuk cites specific figures: every hryvnia invested in the mental health of personnel returns up to 4.5 hryvnias in increased productivity.
When proper working conditions are created, an employee is able to complete the same volume of work in three hours, which would take significantly more time under conditions of stress and overload.
Four-Day Work Week and Recovery Days
Europe is actively testing the four-day work week. In Ukraine, it is currently difficult to scale this model across the entire state; however, according to Bozhuk, it is expedient to launch pilot projects at individual enterprises to evaluate their effectiveness.
However, in the current conditions, so-called "recovery days" could have a more significant effect. This involves exempting an employee from meeting quotas after mass shelling if they did not sleep at night. For risk groups prone to professional burnout, reducing the workload should become not a privilege, but a mandatory requirement.
The Problem of Veteran Reintegration
A separate challenge for the labor market remains the return of veterans. Currently, support for defenders is often a local initiative of individual communities, which is insufficient to solve the problem on a national scale.
Without a unified state systematic policy that includes the adaptation of workplaces and the expansion of the system of professional reorientation, the reintegration process will be extremely difficult. As an example, the expert cites the experience of Israel, where veterans who underwent educational and recovery programs integrated into society 20 times more successfully. Strategic planning at the state level is critically important for preserving the health of the nation.
Rise in Chronic Diseases and Expansion of State Programs
The war has significantly increased the number of cases of endocrine and cardiovascular system diseases. If the country does not introduce a special health support program, the number of such diseases could increase by 20–30% in the coming years.
In response to these challenges, Ukraine is expanding the state program "Accessible Medicines." The list will include modern drugs for type II diabetes, as well as medicines for the prevention of heart attacks, strokes, and thrombosis. Funding for the program in 2026 has been increased to 8.7 billion hryvnias.