Why corporate wellness program

Corporate health & wellness programs have a 20-year track record of being a great investment for corporations.

If run correctly, the return on investment (ROI) is hard to ignore .According to the Partnership for Prevention; a meta-review of 42 published studies of worksite health promotion programs shows:

· Average $5.93-to-$1 savings-to-cost ratio

· Average 28% reduction in sick leave absenteeism

· Average 26% reduction in health costs

· Average 30% reduction in workers' compensation and disability management claims costs

With so much empirical evidence that health & wellness programs save companies money, why are so many corporations cutting back on these programs when they need them the most? The answer is simple, if the company does not put aside funding for these programs they will not happen. Many companies fund minor health & wellness programs out of their discretional budgets so there is no firm commitment to the health of their employees, and it shows.

“This has been a fundamental flaw with many corporate health & wellness programs,” says John Buckley, president of Health Fairs Direct, a 12 year old corporate health and wellness coordination company. “We routinely receive requests from corporations, large and small, that they want to ‘Create a Culture of Health & Wellness’. When we ask them how they plan on accomplishing this and what their budget is we typically hear that they do not have a budget and were hoping to get a free health fair.”

Some corporations have been led to believe that they can receive free health fairs and medical screenings from local doctor’s offices. These out-of-network doctors invest their marketing dollars into offering enticing freebies to corporations as a trade off for getting access to corporate employees with good insurance. Some of the most common enticements are free total cholesterol and glucose screenings or even free lunch for the entire company. These enticements become hard to resist when there is no budget set aside to provide professional health fair services. But they come with very high back end costs to the corporation. For more information on these back end costs as well as the liability of working directly with local doctors, or doctors disguised as health fair companies visit:http://www.healthfairsdirect.com/CorporateBenefits/WOF/