Promoting health at the workplace: challenges of prevention, productivity, and program implementation

In the current complex employment landscape providing employer-sponsored benefits involves much more than offering financial protection when employee illness drives a need for costly medical treatment. The transitions in work from product/service production to knowledge generation, along with the transitions in the predominant health and disease conditions from acute illness to preventable chronic disease, require employers to recognize the need to manage their health investment more strategically. This includes the more recent requirement to maximize their investment by ensuring that provisions for maintaining and improving employee health status are incorporated into their health benefits approach. Meanwhile employee health improvement, a highly active but emerging field, is in the process of incorporating experience, research, and more effective methods that result in favorable and demonstrable employee health (and corporate cost-benefit) outcomes.