Guide for Assessing Wellness Programs

A s employers' interest and commitfiment to well ness programs for their employees grow, the need to identify cost-effective risk factor reduction interventions grows. Packaged interventions are an attractive programming altemative. A guide for assessing various characteristics of a packaged intervention can help the purchaser see through slick marketing techniques and point out the strengths and weaknesses of an intervention. One of the newest and fastest growing enterprises is workplace wellness (Behrens, 1987). Growth of this industry has been fueled by concern over rising health care costs, an increased understanding that lifestyle contributes to premature morbidity and mortality, and a heightened awareness of the real and potential benefits that a wellness program offers. Managers, who only a few years ago wanted to see unequivocal evidence of the contribution of health promotion to the company's "bottom line" before making a commitment, are now connecting with numerous providers of workplace wellness products and services. The person responsible for developing or coordinating a wellness program may have little formal training in health education or program administration. For this person, initial investigation soon reveals that there are a variety of approaches that may be taken. Basically, the person must choose between having interventions offered in-house by staff or contracting for services through an outside qualified vendor. Some combination of the two is another alternative. The company that contracts with an outside vendor relies on that vendor's expertise to offer a quality intervention. Intervention is defined as an activity concentrated on a specific content area-such as smoking cessation or weight loss-and that may be part of a more comprehensive ongoing wellness program. Whereas contracting with outside vendors adds variety and helps build community relations, particularly with nonprofit voluntary health agencies, a company that develops the capability to offer interventions gains certain advantages. The main advantages may include: • Lower costs. • Creation of a sense of ownership. • Greater flexibility in scheduling. • The ability to modify the intervention. A company's real disadvantage in offering its own risk reduction intervention (eg, smoking cessation, stress management, weight reduction) is that it takes a considerable amount of time and expertise to develop such an intervention. The time to research, develop, test, and refine an intervention aimed at longterm behavior change may take six months to a year, depending on the number of people assigned to the project and their abilities. An attractive alternative to developing one's own intervention is the purchasing of a ready-made or "packaged" intervention. The growth in employer interest for workplace wellness programs has been accompanied by an increase in the number of vendors interested in selling wellness products and services, such as packaged interventions (Harris, 1986). A packaged program consists of all, or nearly all, of the necessary ingredients to deliver an intervention, usually a series of education classes with a health behavior change implicitly or explicitly understood as one of the main objectives. A packaged intervention might include: • A facilitator's guide. • Lesson plans. • Audio-visual teaching aids. • Promotional material. • Participant workbooks, handouts, and evaluation tools. Despite a packaged intervention's attractiveness, buyers should be fully aware of what they are committing themselves to. As with any product or service, certain characteristics make the product or service more or less attractive/valuable to any given purchaser (Bills, 1985; Powell, 1985). Furthermore, marketing techniques can make the poorer products or services often appear more attractive or effective than the. truly good ones. The guide for assessing packaged wellness interventions is designed to encourage the potential buyer to consider many important characteristics associated with a quality packaged intervention, and the questions listed are designed to stimulate the potential purchaser's thinking about an intervention's value. No attempt is made to devise a scoring system, since the importance attached to each characteristic will vary from person to person. Whether greater importance is placed on overall cost, proven effectiveness, materials' completeness, or prior use by a well-known company, the guide will facilitate assessment of the overall worth of an intervention. A decision to purchase will be more a consequence of thoughtful consideration, rather than a result of fancy marketing techniques.