The Small Business Health Model - A Guide to Developing and Implementing the Workplace Health System in Small Business

Introduction

This guide outlines the seven steps required to develop and implement the Workplace Health System through the Small Business Health Model.

Following each step ensures that clearly identified values are integrated into all aspects of workplace health programs, from concept to delivery.

The Seven Steps

• Orientation
• Getting Organized
• Assessing Needs
• Workplace Health Profile
• Small Business Health Plan
• Annual Program Action Plan
• Progress Review

Trying it On

Most people shop around before they buy. With clothing, they assess fabrics, colours and styles, then try on a garment for comfort and fit. With cars, they look at style, safety, fuel economy, and cost.

The Small Business Health Model can be tailored and customized to suit particular styles, comfort and economy.

This guide will help you build the model that suits you best.

Health as Wellness

Health is more than an absence of illness. Health is an essential life ingredient that is influenced daily by personal circum- stances, attitudes, beliefs and actions; and by the cultural, social, economic and physical environments in which an individual exists.

Underlying the Small Business Health Model is the principle that health is a resource that gives people the ability to manage and even change their surroundings. It is a part of everyday living, an essential dimension of the quality of our lives.

Health promotion therefore must influence the physical factors of health, as well as its emotional and social factors.

These three elements affect people at work and at home. They are the key to wellness he personal experience of physical and mental health.

The Workplace Health System takes into account physical, emotional and social factors, and the interactions between individuals and their environments.

A healthy workplace provides mutual benefits for employers and employees within a common belief that good health practices by both will lead to individual and organizational self-fulfilment and productivity.

Health promotion is the process of enabling employees to increase control over and to improve their health.