Why Workplace Health Promotion?
The workplace is an important part of workers’ lives. The average working adult spends at least one third of their day at work. Employee health has a significant impact on productivity and absenteeism as well as general wellbeing and alertness. What happens in the workplace has a major influence on staff at work and at home.
To support the adoption of health strategies, the workplace offers an ideal setting and infrastructure with a defined population. The workplace is ideal to reach often hard to reach groups for health initiatives such as blue collar workers, shift workers and men.
The WA Healthy Business program is based on the benefits of workplace health promotion, and workplace health issues. It uses a comprehensive workplace approach to develop a program designed to improve the health of workers with education and skill development.
The program focus for WA Healthy Business involves providing workplaces with the skills to develop their own health programs addressing the priority health areas identified in the needs assessment. These tailored workplace health programs use a combination of health initiatives to increase the health choices available to employees and their access to these. WA Healthy Business ensures the new strategies for these workplace health promotion programs are continued by providing the team of workplace coordinators with workshops to develop policy writing skills. These new healthy policies must then be approved by senior management to become part of their workplace environment. Some of these policies might include a nutrition policy including fruit bowls, adding healthier options in vending machines, and only supplying reduced fat milk for teas, coffees.
By planning, implementing and evaluating workplace health promotion programs which target specific risk factors, WA Healthy Business and its clients can reduce the long-term risk of Western Australians developing chronic lifestyle diseases.