New campaign calls for Victorian employer health care

With sick leave estimated to annually cost Victorian employers more than $2800 per employee, a new advertising campaign calls on employers to sign up for free WorkHealth checks from WorkSafe Victoria.

Pam Anders, WorkHealth Director, said that since the program began the free, confidential, 15-minute WorkHealth checks had been delivered at more than 19,000 workplaces across the state: “Smart employers know that employee health and wellbeing has an enormous impact on their bottom line, which is one of the reasons we have seen an increasing focus on health and wellbeing in many workplaces.

“But we’re also finding that the most common reasons that bosses sign up for WorkHealth checks is because they want to show they care about their staff and support them to look after their health.

“We know that the vast majority of employers really do care about their workers, and the WorkHealth checks are a great way to demonstrate this.”

For Reece Plumbing’s Distribution Centres Manager, Mark Nisbet, the benefits for signing up for WorkHealth checks at the company’s distribution centre were obvious, and go far beyond the bottom line.

“We’ve had a couple of blokes in our team have heart attacks while at work over recent years,” he remarked. “Having ambulances pull up at our workplace was a fairly harsh reality; and as the employer, we felt we would have liked to have done something to help prevent this from happening.

“WorkHealth checks for us seemed the perfect way to help our staff learn about their health risks, and hopefully stop major problems before they occur.

“Several of our people have gone on to make positive changes, myself included. We’re now looking at other ways that we can support healthy lifestyle choices at our workplace, including introducing a subsidised on-site canteen to encourage healthier eating throughout the day.”

Anders added that for many of the 290,000 workers so far who have received WorkHealth checks, their results may have been an initial shock but had helped to spur them into action to change their lifestyles.

This included at least 66% of workers found to have a medium or high risk of developing type-2 diabetes or heart disease, and needing to make some changes in order to avoid serious illness. Further results show that 70% of workers reported inadequate physical exercise and 25% of workers had high cholesterol.