When staffing your health promotion program you need to consider whether to hire a wellness staff or contract with wellness specialists from outside your organization.
Small and medium size worksites don’t ordinarily have a wellness expert on staff. When your worksite is in this category, you’ll need to contract with providers outside your corporation.
Large corporations have a few choices. They can hire a staff solely for the health promotion program, they can contract with outside wellness providers, or they can use a combination of internal staff and outside providers.
When picking a provider some key questions in the areas of staff, program structure, process, and effectiveness need to be addressed. Each of these key questions is discussed in the following sections.
Health Promotion Company Staff
Health professionals become wellness professionals when they are trained in the full range of wellness activities. Health Promotion professionals are generalists who come from a broad variety of backgrounds and schooling.
They may be nurses, dietitians, health educators, counselors, exercise physiologists, or have other backgrounds. But besides to their primary training, they know something about all wellness topics, including smoking, stress, exercise, and nutrition.
They also know how to engage and support people in making and sustaining health improvements and have good people skills.
Normally, wellness experts at worksites fall into three wide categories, wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and wellness instructors.
• Health Promotion screeners introduce workers to the program, take health measurements, collect health-related information, provide initial counseling, and help workers define for themselves what they need and want in a health promotion program.
• Health Promotion counselors work with staff members after the screening to help them develop and carry out a plan to reduce their risks and improve their health.
• Health Promotion instructors teach classes and minigroups on different health topics.
A health promotion program in a small business may be staffed by a single staff individuals who fills all three roles. Bigger worksites will use different individuals to fill these roles.
When choosing staff or choosing among wellness corporations, ask the following questions –
• Do prospective staff members have a range of health backgrounds that will provide appropriate specialistise in the topics to be addressed?
• Have prospective employees functioned well as wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and/or wellness instructors?
• Will this staff include people from the racial and ethnic backgrounds found in your employee population?
• Is each staff member comfortable with the range of backgrounds found in your staff member population, and able to communicate effectively with the various social and educational levels of your employees?
• Do employees have a warm, but specialist, counseling style when interacting with employees?
Tags: Corporation, Health, Promotion, Selecting