Canadians are generally healthy people. Thanks to a high standard of living and public health efforts, such as smoking cessation, immunization and seatbelt safety programs, most of us enjoy good health and we’re living healthier for longer.

But there are inequalities in health status, due to genetic, personal and certain socioeconomic factors. A person who didn’t finish high school, for instance, is more likely to be obese than someone with a post-secondary education. Lower-income Canadians are less likely to be physically active than wealthy individuals. Blue-collar workers experience over four times the injury rate of white-collar workers.

A report by the Public Health Agency of Canada says that there are “many things we can do—both individually and collectively—to create the conditions that are the foundation of good health.”

Employers have a significant role to play: The workplace is an ideal venue for health education and health promotion. There’s certainly a need for it: This year’s sanofi-aventis Healthcare Survey asked plan members to identify risk factors for certain diseases, and a surprisingly large number of them came up short. Only 60% of respondents mentioned proper diet and nutrition as a preventive measure for obesity, while only 57% said exercise, and a mere 4% said watching one’s weight. To prevent cancer, less than half of respondents (45%) mentioned smoking cessation.

There are several things you can do to promote the health of your workforce. Educate employees about disease prevention through posters, internal newsletters and lunch ’n learns. Ensure there are healthy food choices at work and offer incentives to encourage physical activity and smoking cessation. Use employee focus groups to find out what’s causing workplace stress and address those issues. Also improve work-life balance by aligning HR policies regarding work hours, workload and personal time-off. Helping employees achieve better health and life balance will mean lower benefit costs for you and less time and money lost to short- and long-term disability leave.

These suggestions are but a few—any significant impact on employee health requires workplace health to become a part of your business strategy and corporate culture—but they make for a healthy start.

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