Workplace-focused health promotion programs in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

themes, and in the United Kingdom, one theme has origins in United Kingdom legislation [Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA), 1974] that promoted safe and healthy working environments. This theme puts the onus on the employer for the organization of the physical and psychosocial work domain. The other theme is related to the behavior, attitude, and lifestyle of the worker and is entrenched in personal responsibility for individual health. In an ideal world, promotion should unify these two concepts. Workplace health promotion is integral to ordinary work practice, the working environment, and the organization and is envisaged as shared between communities, employees, managers, and their environments. The European Union and the Luxembourg Declaration on Workplace Health Promotion further defined workplace health promotion as the combined efforts to improve the health and well being of people at work. Both the healthy workplace environment and individual lifestyle changes are necessary to achieve health promotion goals, and these should go hand-in-hand. In reality, however, individual behavioral change is too often the focus, rather than the organizational aspects of the worker’s environment. In the United Kingdom, health promotion activities in the 1980-1990s included smoking, alcohol, and drug education; weight control; exercise; stress management; and screening. New initiatives have been focused on obesity and fitness, exemplified by the recent statement that many young men are not fit enough for recruitment into the British Armed Forces. The former Health Education Authority (HEA) prioritized development and support for health promotion in the workplace. The 1990s saw the emergence of the cost-benefit culture with the development of evaluation and assessment of effectiveness. The HEA report of 1993 found the aims of health promotion were not necessarily incorporated within workplace culture. A subsequent publication established that workplace health initiatives were largely motivated by compliance with legislative requirements, rather than the need to promote positive health.