Posts from — December 2010

When choosing  a wellness program from a vendor you ought to ask the following questions -

o  Exactly how many workplaces have done the wellness program?

o  What kinds of worker population was the wellness program offered?

o  What educational materials are used?

o  Will the wellness program meet the needs of employees?

o  What are the techniques used to help change behaviors?

o  Does the wellness program help individuals  move through stages of readiness to make health behavior changes?

o  Exactly how do you market the health promotion program to employees?

o  What follow-up do you provide?

o  Just how do you make referrals for medical care or other supportive services staff may need?

o  Exactly how do you know the health promotion program works?

o  Just how do you measure participant satisfaction?

When staffing your health promotion program you need to consider whether to hire a wellness staff or contract with wellness specialists from outside your business.

Small and medium size workplaces do not generally have a wellness professional on staff. If your workplace is in this category, you’ll need to contract with providers outside your business.

Large companies have a few choices. They can hire a staff solely for the health promotion program, they can contract with outside wellness providers, or they can use a combination of internal staff and outside providers.

When choosing  a provider some key questions in the areas of staff, wellness program structure, process, and effectiveness need to be addressed. Each of these key questions is discussed in the following sections.

Wellness Company Staff

Health experts become wellness experts when they are trained in the full range of wellness activities. Health Promotion experts are generalists who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and schooling.

They could be nurses, dietitians, health educators, counselors, exercise physiologists, or have other backgrounds. But further to their primary training, they know something about all wellness topics, including tobacco use, stress, exercise, and nutrition.

They also know how to engage and support individuals  in making and sustaining health improvements and have good individuals  skills.

Generally, wellness specialists at workplaces fall into three broad categories, wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and wellness instructors.

o  Wellness screeners introduce staff members to the wellness program, take health measurements, collect health-related information, provide initial counseling, and help staff members define for themselves what they need and want in a wellness program.

o  Wellness counselors work with staff members after the screening to help them create and carry out a plan to reduce their risks and improve their health.

o  Health Promotion instructors teach courses and minigroups on different health topics.

A wellness program in a small corporation could be staffed by a single staff individuals who fills all three roles. Bigger workplaces will use different people  to fill these roles.

When choosing  staff or choosing  among wellness companies, ask the following questions -

o  Do prospective workers have a range of health backgrounds that will provide appropriate professionalise in the topics to be addressed?

o  Have prospective personnel functioned well as wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and/or wellness instructors?

o  Will this staff include people  from the ethnic and racial backgrounds found in your worker population?

o  Is each staff member comfortable with the range of backgrounds found in your staff member population, and able to communicate effectively with the various social and educational levels of your employees?

o  Do staff have a warm, but specialist, counseling style when interacting with employees?

An annual plan for the major wellness programs and activities is a useful management tool. This is an excellent wellness committee task. Often an activity and wellness theme per month is offered to staff.

A lot of corporations pick to follow a National Health Observances calendar which offers advantages.  The materials created by these various national health corporations are very credible.  The materials are generally high quality and available free or at a nominal cost.

The business benefits from additional publicity that occurs in various media throughout the community related to the national observance. for planning suggestions you might want to utilize the HOPE Publications Health Promotion Resource Planning Guide available for free at this Web site.

A Health Risk Assessment (HRA)  is sometimes used combined with a health screening.  An Health Risk Assessment (HRA) is a computerized assessment tool which looks at an individual’s family history, health status, and lifestyle.

An HRA seeks to identify precursors associated with premature death or serious disease and quantifies the probable impact for each individual.

An Health Risk Assessment (HRA) instrument is derived from an understanding of the during a disease. Based on this understanding, useful prediction instruments could be constructed to assess the health risks of an individual. Person with a higher number of health risks tend to have more serious health problems over time.

Drawing attention to their health risks can help customers reduce risk factors which lead to the onset of unnecessary illness and subsequent premature death.

The questionnaire covers lifestyle habits (like smoking, seat belt use, and exercise) and physical measures (like cholesterol, blood pressure levels, height, and weight).

For accuracy, it’s crucial to obtain direct measures of blood pressure, cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol.  The Health Risk Assessment (HRA) also provides recommendations and indicates what risks are modifiable. Kinds of measures to assess health risks are discussed under Screening Programs.

The impact of a health risk appraisal is much greater when it is given in-person, with immediate feedback to the patron. This also provides an opportunity to invite the patron’s participation in continuing health counseling and to gain their written consent to do pro-active outreach to them.

A health age may be computed based on the individual answers to the questionnaire and physiologic factors.  The health age may indicate the individual to be younger or older than their chronological age.

HRA programs are one the most prolific kinds of wellness activities utilized by companies. Continuing research on HRAs is examining the efficacy of this tool.

Among the big benefits of this tool is that it can provide an aggregate group report of a organization and could be utilized as an analysis tool.

Detailed information is available from the Society of Prospective Medicine (www.spm.org/desc.html) who publishes a handbook on HRAs.