This week, workplaces across the globe will pause to reflect on what it truly means to support the health of their people. This year’s World Well-being Week observance arrives at a moment when it demands a deeper, more honest reckoning with the chronic health conditions that quietly shape the lives of millions of employees.

Before we can build healthier workplaces, we must first recognise that few conditions demand this reckoning more urgently than diabetes. For me, this is not an abstract concern. As a doctor, I have witnessed patients whose lives are shaped by this disease: the daily discipline of blood sugar monitoring, the quiet anxieties that accompany every meal and every symptom, and the resilience required to show up and function while carrying a condition that never takes a day off. They see people with diabetic complications around them losing eyesight, dying from strokes, on dialysis because of kidney failure and, of course, facing healing problems which may lead to amputation. All of this also leads to depression, which is usually not accounted for.

On a personal level, diabetes runs in my own family. I have watched loved ones navigate the same terrain and ultimately lose their lives to its complications. My own father passed away when he was 42. This is not a condition that stays within clinic walls. It follows people into their workplaces, their relationships and their futures.

According to the International Diabetes Federation, globally, one in nine individuals is now living with diabetes. Health expenditure linked to diabetes has surpassed USD 1 trillion, a staggering 338 per cent increase over the last 17 years. In Pakistan, the picture is even more alarming, with the country being home to........

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