Workplace health protection and promotion: a new pathway for a healthier--and safer--workforce.

T raditionally, health protection and health promotion activities have operated independently of each other in the workplace. Health protection has usually been viewed as encompassing the activities that protect workers from occupational injury and illness ranging from basic safety training to the use of protective gear, work organization, and safety-enhancing modifications. Health promotion, by contrast, has usually been viewed as encompassing the activities that maintain or improve the personal health of a workforce—ranging from health risk assessments to wellness initiatives and immunizations. By placing boundaries around these activities (creating workplace “silos”), their overall effectiveness has been limited. A new concept, “Workplace Health Protection and Promotion,” seeks to address this limitation by systematically integrating these two previously independent functions. Today’s best evidence indicates that the aims of both health protection and health promotion interventions are best achieved when they are working in concert. Workplace health protection and promotion enhances the overall well-being of a workforce by more closely integrating health promotion and health protection activities along a continuum. In this model, health promotion interventions contribute dynamically to improved personal safety in addition to enhancing personal health, while occupational safety interventions contribute dynamically to improved personal health in addition to enhancing personal safety. The two factors, personal health and personal safety—each essential to a productive worker and to a productive workplace– are effectively combined in a symbiotic manner that increases their impact on overall health and productivity. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Once health protection and promotion programs are intertwined and deployed strategically to enhance each other, a healthier workforce thus becomes a safer workforce and vice versa. Organizations, whether large or small, can engage in this new strategy by systematically integrating their health promotion safety and environmental programs, policies, and processes. Activities incorporated in workplace health protection and promotion are diverse and reflect a wide range of functions and goals. Examples include assessing worker health status, addressing personal health risks, the early recognition and treatment of injury or illness, job safety initiatives and efforts to create cultures of health and safety, disability prevention and return-to-work programs, emergency preparedness planning, and behavioral health and environmental safety initiatives. While these may appear to be diverse approaches, they are all aimed at the same thing: promoting overall health and preventing workplace injuries and illnesses. Stated simply, workplace health protection and promotion is the strategic and systematic integration of distinct environmental, health, and safety policies and programs into a continuum of activi-