GM employees are healthier these days thanks to the joint efforts of Eva Csendes and Lyle Hargrove

Employees at three General Motors (GM) assembly plants in Ontario are healthier these days, thanks to the joint efforts of Eva Csendes, GM’s director of divisional benefits/policy administration, and Lyle Hargrove, director of the Health & Safety Fund of the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW). The pair was instrumental in establishing an in-plant cardiovascular screening and followup program for hourly workers, aptly dubbed “Brake for Health.”

It all began a few years ago with the automaker’s desire to make its existing wellness program more meaningful to employees. GM asked its healthcare provider to determine what illness the company could target to have the most impact. “They came up with cardiovascular, so from that, we started to put together a program,” she says.

Hargrove, who is also a member of GM’s and CAW’s joint wellness program committee, began to research best practices. “He actually went out to see what was out there that we could use to help us with the program,” says Csendes. Hargrove is, after all, a former Who’s Who Award winner for a wellness program he initiated at another company, and meets frequently with health professionals and various organizations in search of new and innovative opportunities to promote workplace health and disease management.

The result was the Brake for Health program, which kicked off in 2006 at GM’s largest Canadian assembly plant, in Oshawa. Health professionals screen employees during working hours—at a brisk pace of 10 minutes per worker— for blood pressure, random glucose and total cholesterol. Those at risk then participate in a multi-phased follow-up program.

Csendes says the biggest challenge was to give hourly employees time off the job to do the screening, “but we were successful in convincing management that it was worthwhile. Then, as they got feedback from employees as to how much they appreciated it, and they saw some results, I think they found it very worthwhile, as well.” In fact, she adds, “there were some cases where had they not had the screening done and gone to the doctor, it could have had serious consequences, so we’ve been quite pleased with how it all turned out.”

The program is now running in the company’s Woodstock and Windsor plants as well, and will soon be implemented in its St. Catharines facility.

In 2009, GM will initiate a diabetes program that will also include a screening component. “I just think the more we’re at it, the better we are at understanding what the employees’ needs are and helping them out,” says Csendes.

Meanwhile, Hargrove hopes to implement similar programs with some of CAW’s other members, for example, in the air and rail transportation sectors. “That’s my goal, at some point, to see that in all of our workplaces,” he says. “And we do have it in our bargaining agenda over the next three years to expand that.”

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© Copyright 2008 Rogers Publishing Ltd. This article first appeared in the November 2008 edition of WORKING WELL magazine.