Move Our Bodies - Healthy Workplace Project — Agentur Pty Ltd

Move Our Bodies - Healthy Workplace Project (11)

Anita O'Halloran 1 , Aaron Hollins 1 , Tricia Hunt 2
  1. Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council, West End, Queensland, Australia
  2. Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Background:

Sedentary behaviour is a risk factor for the development of chronic diseases. Employing organisational wide strategies and using the workplace as a health promotion setting is seen as a priority for related interventions. This project is specific to employees within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled Health Services (AICCHS) in Queensland and centres on creating healthy workplaces, with a focus on behaviour change in physical energy expenditure.

Methods:

This health promoting project follows the social-ecological model and includes the implementation of a healthy workplace policy, changes to traditional desk settings to include more active office infrastructure, and the promotion of associated health benefits through e-mail based messaging systems.

Results/Discussions:

The project collaborated with existing employees within the organisation to establish local leadership, an important foundation for health promotion projects. These employees become the Champion of the project, playing a significant role in communicating and maintaining on the ground support. The Champions assist in the collection of base-line, process and post intervention data, and if desired, are supported to analyse and report findings. In this presentation we will describe the process for the recruitment of health services and project Champions as well as preliminary findings of the intervention and the barriers and enablers as experienced by the project team. 

Conclusions/implications:

The workplace is a well known setting for health promotion. This project presents the development of a workplace sedentary behaviour health promotion project and discusses the enablers and barriers to its implementation. The role of the Champions within the setting and how they influenced the project will also be highlighted.

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