Healthier habits

From staff and wire services

Brown-bag lunch discussions on weight control, lessons on controlling blood pressure and free cholesterol screenings are a few of the ways businesses try to promote better health among their employees.

Learning how to identify health risks and addressing those problems are crucial to keeping employees healthy and at work, say area wellness educators.

Reducing risks is a hard thing to measure in terms of business savings, said Sandy Duncan, operations manager for Saint Francis' FitnessPlus health center in Cape Girardeau.

A Georgia company learned its lessons on employee wellness and prevention the hard way. In the early 1990s, Fieldale Farms had a troubling problem: Employee heart attacks, at an average cost of $50,000 apiece, were quickly making insurance unaffordable for the small chicken-processing company.

"At the time, the average worker was 45 years old," said Denise Ivester, Fieldale's human resources manager. "I said, 'This is from gravy and biscuits in the South.'"

Indeed, local habits were hard to break -- workers didn't get regular exercise and preferred deep-fried Southern delicacies over fruits and vegetables.

But the company went on a campaign to make its 4,600 employees healthier. It paid for gym memberships and offered free health screenings, one-on-one nutritional counseling and educational sessions at work about heart disease, diabetes and other preventable health problems.

Those steps helped Fieldale, which processes and packages chicken for grocery stores, go from a health-cost nightmare to a healthy model. It is one of six companies nationally that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is citing as an example of what businesses can do to improve employee health.

Finding ways to motivate employees to take part in wellness screenings is a tough part of the job, Duncan said. Businesses have to find what motivates their employees to participate in the wellness screenings and programs. Some area companies offer reduced rates on gym memberships, financial incentives or extra vacation days.

Convincing employees of the need to better manage their health is relatively easy once they realize the health information isn't being used to target specific groups or discriminate, said Rhett Hendrickson, director of Healthworks at Southeast Missouri Hospital.

"Question-and-answer sessions help, and employees buy into the notion that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure," he said.

Simple adjustments like walking around the house after work or taking the dog for a walk around the block can have a tremendous effect on lowering blood pressure, and "it's so much easier to do and not have a heart attack at 45," Hendrickson said.

Major corporations like General Motors, L.L. Bean, and Johnson & Johnson have offered wellness programs for years, but Fieldale Farms is noteworthy because it is so much smaller than the Fortune 500 giants, said Dyann Matsonkoffman, of the CDC's cardiovascular health branch.

"Our business is to promote health, and where do most adults spend most of their time? At the worksite," Matsonkoffman said.

Nationwide, about 43 percent of companies surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management offered health screenings. One in five have fitness centers at work, and more than a quarter offer weight-loss programs.

Duncan said the more exposure employees have to learning about their health risks, the more likely they are to take steps to prevent further chronic disease.

The difficulty with wellness programs is that there's no way to measure the savings in fewer accrued sick days or greater productivity, she said.

"You can't prove what you prevented," Hendrickson said.

Wellness programs help people take a little more responsibility for their own health care, he said.

Poultry plant supervisor Tony Bennett said he has benefited from Fieldale's health program. In January, he had a heart attack at work. Despite being warned of his high cholesterol in a screening test, he failed to change his diet and exercise habits.

That's all in the past.

Now, Bennett takes advantage of the company's free gym memberships, working out three times a week. He also stays away from fried foods, eats more salads and only drinks a soda a week, instead of one a day.

"I can tell a difference since I made lifestyle changes," Bennett said.

Features editor Laura Johnston contributed to this report.