Take Steps To...
Employers and Businesses
Good health is good for business. When more people in a community are healthy, there are lower health costs, fewer sick days, and increased productivity. When communities are healthier, everyone in the community benefits.
A county's health affects its economic competitiveness. Achieving lower health care costs, fewer sick days, and increased productivity are all critical to economic growth. Here are some basic ways you can help:
- Make your business a healthy place to work, e.g., offer physical activity plans and smoking-cessation programs to your employees, offer healthy foods in your cafeteria, and motivate employees to make healthy choices through financial incentives.
- Encourage employee fitness by subsidizing gym memberships, offering onsite gym facilities, and promoting use of stairways.
- Educate all managers about the link between employee health and productivity.
Here are some other ways you can help:
- Get the word out. Reach out to people you know and see every day about the County Health Rankings report, e.g., at a local Chamber of Commerce breakfast or a staff meeting.
- Organize. Meet with other local leaders and community residents to discuss barriers to health and ways to overcome them. Host a town hall meeting or invite people to one.
- Get policymakers to pay attention. Tell them about how their county or counties ranked and open a dialogue about ways to improve health in your community.
- Be an advocate. Step out as a leader in your community’s efforts to prevent illness and promote health.
- Contact your local public health department about participating in a local task force or, if none exists, organize one to tackle these pressing issues in your community.
- Ask your local or state health department about what they’re doing in response to the report to make sure you aren’t duplicating efforts.
- Share your resources. Offer your time, staff, and/or funding with community partners. These are resources that can go toward community plans and programs aimed at tackling factors that affect health.
- Communicate your message. Write an op-ed or talk to local media about the Rankings and what needs to be done to improve the health of your community.
- Start a conversation. Talk to your friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members about the health of your community and what everyone collectively can do to make it healthier.
There are a number of resources that employers and businesses can turn to for help with improving specific aspects of the health of their own employees, their families, and their communities:
- Why Invest? Recommendations for Improving Your Prevention Investment (from the Partnership for Prevention)
- Investing in Health: Proven Health Promotion Practices for Workplaces (from the Partnership for Prevention) --provides employers with guidance that can improve employee health by controlling tobacco use, promoting cancer screening and early detection, and encouraging physical activity and healthy eating
- Resources for Workplace Wellness (from the Center for Health Improvement)
- Programs that Work in the Workplace (from the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease)
- Getting Active: Physical Activity at Work (from the Wellness Council of America)
- Healthier Worksite Initiative (from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
- Partnership for Workplace Mental Health (from the American Psychiatric Foundation)
- Bridges to Excellence--an initiative to improve quality of care by recognizing and rewarding health care providers who demonstrate that they have implemented comprehensive solutions in the management of patients and deliver safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered care.
- Community Quality Collaboratives--community-based organizations of multiple stakeholders, including health care providers, purchasers (employers, employer coalitions, Medicaid and others), health plans, and consumer advocacy organizations, that are working together to transform health care at the local level.
