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Health and Wellbeing at Work

5th May 2017

With a vision to achieve excellence in the delivery of care through the provision of person-centred health and care services, as an employer we are equally committed to providing a healthy and safe working environment to support staff.

By helping to maintain and enhance the personal health and wellbeing of staff at work means they are better engaged and more productive. This enables us to be seen as an employer of choice, which in turn supports the ongoing success of our business.

Health and wellbeing is about being emotionally, psychologically and physically healthy. It is feeling able to cope with everyday stresses and feeling fulfilled with our lives. To create a healthy, happy and safe working environment where staff can give their best, we have developed a Health and Wellbeing Strategy that keeps everyone healthy, well and engaged at work.

As part of this strategy we are running health and wellbeing campaigns during the year to raise awareness of certain topics. Over the past 6 months we have piloted a couple of campaigns to gauge how successful these types of internal communications activities would be:

  • Be a Flu’ Fighter
    We ran a flu’ campaign to raise awareness about the importance of protecting ourselves, our families, colleagues and service users to ensure we all stay well over the winter. 
  • Alcohol Aware
    Tying in with Dry January we ran a number of activities including a quiz about recommended “safe” limits, units and health problems
  • Smoking Awareness
    Launched on No Smoking Day, we encouraged smokers and ex-smokers to share their experiences about why they smoke or the reasons for them stopping which resulted in the launch of a support group on our Intranet

Our most recent campaign, “Get Moving with Medvivo,” coincided with the national “On Your Feet Britain” campaign, which asks the nation to join the fight to improve workplace health by taking on the challenge to sit less and move more.

This is part of a national Get Britain Standing campaign that aims to grow awareness and educate people about the health implications of sedentary working and prolonged sitting time.

Rather than just support this campaign for the one day, we decided to run a much longer term campaign to make sure we are actively encouraging staff to think about spending less time seated for prolonged periods.

Staff are getting involved in a number of activities already which has been great to see evolve:

  • Taking regular breaks between calls by standing every 30 minutes
  • Holding walking or standing meetings
  • Taking the stairs rather than the lift
  • Getting involved in walking challenges with tracker devices such as Fitbit
  • Performing desk yoga
  • Going for lunchtime walks or at least take lunch away from the desk
  • Joining colleagues for walks after work

A handful of staff have also signed up for the VirginPulse 100 Day Global Challenge, and the learnings from this event will be shared among the group.

We have two more campaigns planned for later in the year and will further build on these to continue to drive the health and wellbeing of our staff.

So far feedback from staff has been extremely positive as we all start to integrate health and wellbeing into our day to day activities. By creating a positive and healthy working environment means we are supporting staff both in terms of their wellbeing, but also helping them to achieve their full potential.

Sue Green, HR Manager 

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