Health program makes wellness work for Boston Medical Center employees

Banner Staff

By most accounts, Boston Medical Center (BMC) prides itself on accommodating the health needs of all of its employees, regardless of their particular stage in life.

BMC benefits analyst Kerry Ryan put it another way.
“Sometimes you might need the lactation room, and sometimes you might need some help looking at how to coordinate retirement expenses,” she said with a laugh.

No matter how you put it, whether you’re a nursing mother eager to get back to work or a doting grandparent planning a new chapter in life, the medical center is committed to supporting its workers through all of life’s changes.

That commitment is underscored by a series of healthy lifestyle initiatives the center calls WellnessWorks, a multifaceted approach to improving workers’ welfare. The program, which employs a range of high quality services, is a feather in BMC’s cap, earning the center a 2006 Health Care Champion Award from the Boston Business Journal.

“Work/life programs” like WellnessWorks have two primary goals: to make it easier for employees to successfully manage their numerous responsibilities inside and outside the workplace, and to improve the overall quality of employees’ lives.

Acknowledging that achieving those goals requires addressing a wide variety of lifestyle issues, WellnessWorks affords BMC employees a number of opportunities to start down the path to making lasting improvements, like the annual walking initiative that garnered BMC a 2007 WalkBoston Golden Shoe Award for best employer-sponsored walking program.

The program featured customized walking maps of the neighborhood surrounding the medical center — highlighted by points of sightseeing interest and popular errand locations like dry cleaners, the library and the local post office — and nearby MBTA stations from which employees commute to work, said Ryan. With the distance between the center and those locations already measured out, employees could add up their trips and see how far they’d walked on a daily and weekly basis.

Employees can learn how to incorporate whole grains, fruits and vegetables into their diets in healthy cooking classes taught in an on-site demonstration kitchen, and they can get weekly updates on how to improve their nutrition and exercise habits through an online nutrition and weight loss program called “DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) for Health,” developed by Dr. Thomas Moore of BMC’s Medicine Endocrinology, Diabetes and Nutrition Department.

WellnessWorks also hosts biannual wellness fairs, lunchtime workshops and seminars on a number of health issues, including stress management, an often-overlooked aspect of wellness that Ryan said BMC takes special care to address.

“We offer, on-site and at no cost, first-time home buying programs, financial planning classes, [information on] planning for retirement, investment seminars, estate planning, saving for college” and more, Ryan said. “Those financial situations can often cause stress with individuals and within the family, and by educating people on choices and how to handle things, that also supports them and helps them create some type of balance.”

Starting this spring, the program will also aim to help them learn to balance without a particularly nasty crutch, as the medical center implements a new eight-week medically supervised smoking cessation program, conceptualized and developed at BMC.

Programs like WellnessWorks make business sense for companies because promoting healthier lifestyle choices for their employees can reduce workers’ need for health care, which cuts down on overall costs. And they make sense for workers, who get free, convenient and comprehensive access to high quality resources that may not otherwise have been available to them.

Eliminating obstacles to making healthier choices — like lack of free time and inaccessible locations — is one key to getting employees to buy into these programs. Ryan highlighted another: allowing employees to make better lifestyle decisions on their own, and being there to help when they do.

“It’s not about implying that they’re doing something wrong. We’re trying to support them in those decisions, because change is hard,” said Ryan.

“We know that everybody works hard and gets stressed out, and we’re just trying to support them while they’re already here to help them make some of those steps.”