Workplaces of just a few employees or workplaces of hundreds or thousands of employees can all benefit from workplace wellness programs. The programs can be simple or complex and can involve formal screening programs for illnesses that are best treated early. As an employer, you can link up with a local clinic for a workplace screening program.
You can also have lectures on health related topics, including heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. You can include safety topics like back health and injury prevention and you can have topics related to stress and depression as they relate to the workplace and workplace health.
If you are a large company, you may wish to hire a nurse, full or part time, that can monitor the health of the employees and can manage a possible screening program. A nurse can do periodic blood pressure checks on high risk employees and can do counseling on diabetes and obesity. Employees can depend on the nurse for minor injuries as well as on counseling duties for a great deal of medical topics.
A workplace nurse can reduce absenteeism by handling many of the minor illnesses that come out of working in your company. Nurses can approve or disapprove of a particular request that an employee be absent. While this might not be popular, it does keep employees on the job, doing their duties.
If you decide to have a workplace screening program, you can screen people for their BMI, which is a measure of obesity, hypertension or “high blood pressure”, cholesterol screening, diabetes screening, discussions over smoking and alcohol and other screening tests. These can identify diseases in their early states so that they are cheaper to manage. This can lower overall health costs paid for by both the employer and the workplace. It can lower workplace premiums for health insurance.
Online web portals can be created that are related to health issues. Employees can look up conditions and their treatment, and can get help with things like alcohol abuse and nicotine abuse. Some companies pay for nicotine replacement or other drugs related to stopping smoking, which will lower the risk of a number of smoking related health problems.
So who benefits? Both the employee and the employer or company benefit from wellness programs and the more extensive the program, the better. Those who have nurses or nurse practitioners onsite benefit the most from health related screening and the treatment of minor problems that might come up during the work day. It depends on how many employees you have as well as on the type of business you have.
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