Lately at RTWMatters we’ve experienced the stirrings of a strangely satisfying paranoia. The government, it seems, is listening to us and listening very, very closely.

Opening the door to the tea cupboard, in fact, we half expect to see “power of partnerships” convert Julia Gillard crouched on the lower shelf, pen and notebook in hand, ear-trumpet quivering in the direction of our meeting room. And since the release of the Preventative Health Taskforce Final Report at the beginning of September 2009, we’ve been on the lookout for Health Minister Nicola Roxon, furtively laying surveillance wires behind the all-but-unchipped plaster walls of our office.

How else to explain the fact that Roxon’s department – after years of federal government inaction – is now publicly extolling the virtues of investing in workplace health and wellbeing? (The interested can admire our prescience here, here and here.) The government has at last caught on to a figure that we’ve referred to many a time: employers who invest in workplace health and wellbeing can expect a return of between 2:1 and 5:1.

Buoyed up by this figure, the preventative health strategy advocated by Roxon’s taskforce – recommendations of which are now due to be considered by the government and potentially adopted as policy – includes the following work-related initiatives, aimed at embedding ‘physical activity and healthy eating in everyday life’:

• Reviews of potential legislative changes to encourage employers and employees to get involved with workplace health programs, such as:
  • Tax breaks for participants;
  • Grants or tax breaks for employers who achieve and sustain benchmarks around certain health risk factors; and
  • A workplace health levy, which would require employers to commit a percentage of payroll to health programs;  
• Establishing a ‘voluntary industry scorecard, benchmarking and award scheme for workplace health’;
• Establishing a ‘national action research project to strengthen the evidence of effective workplace health promotion programs in the Australian context’; and
• Establishing a ‘national workplace health leadership program and a series of resources, tools and best practice guidelines’.

According to the strategy, "Workplaces could offer risk assessment and risk modification programs, nutritional education for workers and families and physical activity embedded in, or in association with, regular daily work practices."

While we’d like to take full credit for these exciting suggestions, Roxon plays down our surveillance-fantasies and offers instead an evidence-based explanation for her department’s interest in preventative health.

“The [National Health and Hospitals Reform] Commission,” Roxon noted the day the report was launched, “recently found that chronic, potentially preventable conditions – such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes – consume about 70 per cent of the nation’s health care Budget, yet less than two per cent of health expenditure is directed towards preventing illness.”

“Yep,” I hear you thinking (for we’ve set up some nifty telepathic surveillance of our own), “what have those wacky governments been up to? It is absurd to sit around waiting for health problems to happen and only then devoting resources to fixing them.”

Which is all well and good – as long as you’re not smugly pondering that absurdity from within an organisation which, apart from meeting the bare minimum of OHS obligations, forgets about workplace health and wellbeing until someone lodges a workers’ comp claim or attempts to return to work.

If that is your situation, now is probably a good time to start making the case for preventative health, bearing in mind that the business case for preventing illness and promoting wellbeing is as strong as the ethical and social cases for doing so.

This is an important fact to remember when considering the legislative changes proposed within the preventative health strategy, which if implemented will make workplace health programs an obligation for employers. Organisations are often wary when such obligations are imposed by government, but investing in workplace health is not only good for workers and the broader community, it also makes good business sense. From our perspective, it’s a win-win situation: are we missing something?

Roxon called for people to “Read the recommendations and take the opportunity to provide their thoughts to the Government on this very important topic”. We encourage you to heed her call: and we’re interested in your feedback too. See our poll, or contact us here. You can find the taskforce’s report at www.yourhealth.gov.au.