3 Ways to Celebrate World Health Day
April 7th is World Health Day, a global health awareness day sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) where companies and organizations celebrate with international, regional, and local events related to a public health theme.
WHO compiles a list of the key messages for the event, and here’s a sampling of the list from this year, whose theme is universal healthcare:
- Primary healthcare covers the majority of your health needs throughout your life, including services such as screening for health problems, vaccines, information on how to prevent disease, family planning, treatment for long- and short-term conditions, coordination with other levels of care, and rehabilitation.
- At its heart, primary healthcare is about caring for people and helping them improve their health or maintain their well-being, rather than just treating a single disease or condition.
- A health system with strong primary healthcare delivers better health outcomes, is cost-efficient and improves quality of care.
As a champion of the health and wellness of your workforce, you can help your employees celebrate World Health Day. Here are three ideas:
1. Provide a biometric health screening for your employees. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a biometric screening is a general health check that measures physical characteristics, such as height, weight, blood pressure, and more. Companies can use the aggregated data collected to benchmark and evaluate changes in employee health over time. Typically, in a biometric health screening, a trained medical clinician will check blood pressure, calculate body mass index (BMI), and measure blood cholesterol levels. Those three key measurements can tell your employees a lot about their health. For example, employees’ biometric data can signal whether or not they might be at risk for a number of chronic conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, as well as potentially deadly cardiovascular events, like heart attack and stroke. By participating in this kind of assessment, they can learn tips to help create healthy habits to better manage their health.
2. Hold a special World Health Day challenge. One way to keep step challenges fresh is to center them around a particular theme, and there is no better theme than World Health Day. Fitbit data shows that users who participate in Fitbit’s in-app challenges take an average of 2,000 more steps per day than those who do not participate—which is about an extra mile of walking per day.
Since the focus is on the global community, add a fun incentive for your World Health Day challenge, such as the winning team gets a healthy, chef-prepared lunch comprised of their favorite international cuisine. Think about foods such as these Mediterranean rainbow rolls with lemon tahini dipping sauce.By participating in and sharing their World Health Day challenge on social media, your employees can feel like they are part of a global effort to improve health. Ask them to use the event hashtags #HealthForAll and #WorldHealthDay as they share their workouts during the challenge.
3. Focus on maintaining well-being by suggesting Fitbit groups. Since one key message of World Health Day includes a focus on a person’s well-being, encourage your employees to join a Fitbit group. The Fitbit community has hundreds of different groups, so your employees will surely find one that piques their interest. Active Fitbit Groups range from “All fun, no judgment” to “Can you walk 2019 miles in 2019” to “Everyday woman” to “Desk job employees.” These categories fit nicely into the health for all, everyone, everywhere campaign for World Health Day.