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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)
The Need For And Returns From Worksite Wellness
The Wellness Councils of American (WELCOA), an Omaha-based organization that for 20 years has been a national clearinghouse and information center on worksite wellness, estimates that "more than 81% of American businesses with 50 or more employees have some form of health promotion program - the most popular being exercise, smoking cessation classes, back care programs and stress management." What accounts for this enthusiasm for health promotion throughout corporate America?
WELCOA offers six reasons why such efforts make good business sense and warrant being considered "a national imperative."
Reason 1: This country spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, but our citizens are not the world's healthiest. (See In The Life Expectancy Olympics, America Loses To Japan, France, Australia And 38 Other Countries - But Take Heart, We Spend A Lot More!.) Americans are, in fact, stressed out and sedentary, obese tobacco users who drink too much alcohol and suffer from chronic health problems. No wonder we spend so much on medical care. (See Building A Well Workplace at the WELCOA website.)
Medical costs consume half of corporate profits - or more. Health promotion efforts supplement other steps to contain medical costs, including "cost sharing, cost shifting, managed care plans, risk-rating, and cash-based incentives." Unfortunately, these steps merely shift costs. Only worksite health promotion promises a long-term answer for keeping employees well in the first place. (WELCOA, "Building A Well Workplace.")
WELCOA and other promoters of worksite wellness describe an ultimate goal of creating conditions wherein employees will want to live in ways that enable them to stay well in the first place. Unfortunately, current programs are overwhelmingly focused on simple risk reduction, not health enhancement or what I like to call REAL wellness. Still, these first steps are a useful foundation for what might follow.
Reason 2: Much of the illness in the US is directly preventable. References are provided at the WELCOA site supportive of the view that 95 percent of spending goes for diagnosis and treatment of illness after it occurs, despite the fact that 70 percent of illness is preventable. Leading causes of death, a reminder of the validity of reason number one, are tobacco use, poor diet and alcohol. Lack of sufficient exercise was not noted, but should have been.
Reason 3: Healthcare costs are an issue of significant concern to business. This will not surprise anyone. After all, no other country spends so lavishly on sickness care as we do - $1.7 trillion annually, or 16 percent of GDP. Despite all this spending, 47 million citizens are unprotected, that is, lack health insurance. Many who have it are not as protected from catastrophic expenses as they might think, as Michael Moore famously demonstrated in his hit documentary Sicko. (See Sicko - A Tragicomedy Prescription for Reforming America's Disastrous Medical Non-System.)
Reason 4: The worksite is an ideal setting to address health and well-being. Most Americans work; thus, the hope is that worksite wellness programs can expose employees to a level of health awareness that they have not realized at home, school or elsewhere. Companies have much at stake, given that they bear so much of the costs of illness care.
In fairness to employees, one other reason for viewing the worksite as an ideal setting for addressing health and wellness issues is the fact that conditions associated with working make so many people sick! Honestly. The workplace contributes to unwellness in so many ways, including long commutes in stressful traffic situations, long hours, unrealistic management expectations about productivity, pressure to perform heroically and so on. Such conditions leave too little time for quality of life activities that help people stay well. Many employees do not get adequate sleep, a factor that some experts consider one of the most important elements of a wellness lifestyle.
Reason 5: Empirical research supports the belief that health promotion programs can improve health, save money and produce a return on investment. The WELCOA site contains a listing of studies to back this assertion.
Reason 6: The number of companies crafting what WELCOA terms "world-class wellness programs" is increasing. Examples are offered of organizations that have used various kinds of incentives (financial, for example) to promote weight loss and other desired health enhancement outcomes.
All six reasons put forward by WELCOA are more than enough justification for American companies large and small to investigate the nature and potential returns of worksite wellness. The need is clear, and the evidence that even basic risk reduction and health education programming pays off is persuasive.
The next question to examine might be how worksite wellness could not only bring about medical cost savings but increase quality of life indicators for most employees, as well. Tune in next time for a look at that challenge.
All the best. Look on the bright side of life.
Domain: purposeSubdomain: applied wellness
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