TAUNTON-based health insurer WPA won the Outstanding Innovation of the Year with LifeStage Health at last week's Healthcare Innovation Awards.

Lifestage Health is a pioneering product that facilitates access and raises awareness of women’s health in the workplace and supports their needs throughout life’s natural stages.

It has been extended to include a range of benefits to support all employees regardless of gender and will be rolled out to the SME market in the autumn. It already has more than 15,000 customers.

The judges praised WPA as "an excellent example of a health insurance provider innovating to address new challenges and historic healthcare problems especially those that are not traditionally covered by health insurance policies".

Including all genders was "further demonstrating WPA’s commitment to providing greater levels of service".

Nathan Irwin, WPA’s chief executive, said: "This is fabulous recognition of a pioneering innovative product designed to help our corporate customers support the health and well-being needs of their employees.

"It comes in the same week as the Corporate Adviser magazine service rating awards which ranked WPA’s service as 5*, affirming our industry leading service credentials."

The accolade adds to the compliments LifeStage Health has already received from industry and employee benefit experts.

Debra Clark, head of specialist consulting at Towergate, said: "It’s great to see a health insurer recognising the broader challenges faced by employers and the female workforce.

"LifeStage Health is an innovative solution that helps companies and working women thrive and I’m looking forward to working with WPA and sharing it with my network”.

Lois Rawlings, group healthcare and benefits manager at Specsavers, a WPA customer, said: "We are really pleased to be able to enhance our healthcare benefits with LifeStage Health for the whole of our workforce.

"This added benefit enables our team to seek support and/or treatment quickly for a broad range of conditions that have not been accessible previously through our plan. It was important for us to wait for the addition of ‘men’s health’ into the product as we are passionate about prioritising the health and wellbeing for all of our colleagues."