Wellness Program Investigation.

Program examination may  be the last step, but it must be planned at the beginning of your efforts! Analysis helps you identify what parts of the health promotion program are working well and what parts need improvement.

Then, based on the examination data, adjustments may be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the wellness program based on examination data is vital to its continued success.

Investigating your health promotion program does not have to be complicated.  HOWEVER, it’s crucial to plan how you’ll monitor your wellness efforts and determine success during the planning phase.

In addition remember to evaluate the health promotion program based on the goals and goals you already identified during your planning process.

In order to evaluate your wellness program you need to have a system to document specifics as you go along.  This may be as simple as maintaining file folders on wellness programs that are offered, or a computer document with a table or spreadsheet summarizing information accumulating.  Consider -

o  Program topic and numbers of personnel who participated

o  The numbers of brochures taken by personnel or distributed and on what topics

o  The number of participants in a behavior modification program and how many met their goals in addition to how many attended all of the sessions

o  Numbers of workforce who continued the healthful behavior modification following the health promotion program?

o  Overall employee satisfaction with the health promotion program or each topic. Here’s a sample analysis form.

Depending on your objectives and objectives, gather desired data and compare it to previous data collected during the initial assessment to determine when the objectives were met.  Such data might include

o  Absentee rates

o  Injury rates

o  Health risk factors Insurance costs

Summarize and Report Wellness Program Results

Once you have gathered all the examination information it needs to be reviewed with the Health Promotion Committee and summarized. You will probably have positive results and some areas where a change is needed or additional focus required for continuous improvement.

This not-so positive information can be used to make any needed changes in addition to to plan for next year and is imperative that you include in your report.

It’s crucial that you communicate the health promotion program results to both upper-level management and staff members.  Consider how upper-level management ordinarily receives reports on operations and productivity issues and include the annual health promotion program report in the same format.

At some companies the reports are made during executive management meetings using presentation styles such as power point slides.  At other companies, graphs and bar charts are the norm or a list of the objectives and the summary outcomes reported.

No matter the format, it is crucial that you convey the outcomes and successes achieved, including any anecdotal stories, in addition to areas for improvement. Be sure to link the outcomes to the business mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Employees want to receive the same information!  Consider using the same communication channels used when informing personnel of the wellness program -

o  Company newsletters,

o  Bulletin boards,

o  E-mails

Likewise consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by -

o  Posting pictures from events

o  Highlighting success stories

o  Posting pictures of successes

o  Scheduling a celebration

o  Recognizing champions