Bringing together the national story of the Healthy Workers Initiative

Key messages

• Workplace health and wellbeing programs help people lead healthier lives and avoid chronic disease.
• As part of the National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health, all states and territories implemented the national Healthy Workers Initiative. There were valuable lessons from the experiences of different jurisdictions in trying to translate complex health initiatives into programs.
• This project interviewed those responsible for directing the development and implementation of the Initiative to compare their experiences. While program evaluation usually concerns the impact of individual programs, this project was different because it examined lessons at a state program development level.
• The project found that states took a variety of approaches to the Initiative, but they had common goals: achieving sustainability and capacity for meaningful change.
• The Initiative’s national performance indicators – such as lowering obesity – were not meaningful for state and territory jurisdictions and were not used by them to gauge the success of programs.
• The project identified factors that helped or hindered success of workplace health programs at state level, such as jurisdiction size, political imperatives and funding decisions.
• The project identified four ways jurisdictions sought to achieve their goals:
  • Taking an embedded approach to workplace health promotion
  • Ensuring relevance of the workplace health program to businesses
  • Engaging in collaborative partnerships with agencies responsible for implementation
  • Cultivating evolution of the workplace health program.