Source: Fierce Healthcare.com
Wellness programs lead to employee engagement and cost savings, prompting more hospitals to incorporate employee wellness into their strategy to control future healthcare costs. And with research showing hospital employees have higher healthcare costs than the general population and are less healthy, hospitals are looking beyond simple “no smoking” policies to create healthier campuses for their employees, as well as patients and visitors.
Here are four real-world examples of how healthcare organizations are looking inward to improve employee health:
1. Sound the alarm on smokers
For years, U.S. hospitals have been enforcing stricter hiring practices, with hospitals in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee turning away job applicants who smoke. But Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Scotland has taken it a step further by installing a voice alarm that goes off when anyone lights up outside, the hospital announced earlier this year.
The hospital was looking for a more effective way to extinguish tobacco use. So it put the alarm at its main entrance, where even the lighting of a match triggers a bilingual message telling smokers to stop. If it successfully deters those who had been ignoring no-smoking signs, more alarms will be placed throughout the hospital campus.
Such tobacco-free strategies already are showing real results. For instance, Cleveland Clinic’s strict wellness mandates that include a ban on hiring smokers have led to the number of self-reported smokers dropping from 15.4 percent to 6.8 percent over five years, the Clinic’s Chief Wellness Officer Michael Roizen told FierceHealthcare in a recent interview.
2. Spotlight healthy food
Putting healthier food in the hospital cafeteria is a great start to promoting healthy behavior among employees. But employees and patients need help identifying those healthier options. So Massachusetts General Hospital color-coded food products with red, yellow and green labels to encourage cafeteria customers to choose more nutritional items. After only six months, sales of the red (least healthy) items dropped 14.1 percent, while sales of the green (healthiest) items increased 5.3 percent.
With similar goals in mind, New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center and Overlook Medical Center instituted a rating system that gives food items zero to three stars for nutritional value, the hospitals announced earlier this month. The star ratings aim to make it easier for employees and visitors to make healthier food choices. For added incentive, Overlook is awarding its employees fit points for every star-rated item they purchase, which they can then redeem for gift certificates to use in the hospital cafe.