The Next Stage of Evolution of Workplace Wellness:
A World Economic Forum/World Health Organization Collaboration

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The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) held a meeting in Dalian China on September 5-6, 2007 to advance the cause of making workplace wellness a global priority. This meeting was historic for two reasons.

First, the WHO has traditionally paid little attention to wellness/health promotion or the workplace. Its focus has been on the very important work of providing access to primary medical care, eradicating infectious diseases, and providing people with basic survival resources. Its focus has been on health issues in third world nations. Many of its talented staff have had a long standing commitment to wellness, and some formal health promotion structures and programs have been in place for years. Wellness has just not been a priority. One of my colleagues who left WHO after years of frustration with failures to elevate the importance of wellness told me they should change the name of the organization to the “World Disease Organization.” From my perspective as an outsider, the shift toward wellness seemed to have strong momentum when WHO published the landmark document The World Health Report 2002–Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life under the leadership of Derek Yack, Executive Director, Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health, and Christopher Murray, Executive Director, Evidence and Information for Policy. This report made a compelling case that chronic diseases were the leading cause of death globally and documented the clear link between lifestyle and chronic disease.¹ Derek Yack has taken this work a step further in making visible the case our profession has recognized for decades–that the workplace is an excellent venue to reach a large portion of the population of the world, even in developing nations. In addition to helping developed nations cope with the scourgeof physical inactivity and the obesity epidemic, they hope to be able to help developing nations prevent both these problems from occurring in the first place. When WHO concludes that wellness is a viable strategy, health leaders will take notice.

Second, the WEF has traditionally paid little attention to health, let alone the virtually invisible concept of wellness. WEF has traditionally focused on major social trends that will shape the global economy. The WEF² is an intriguing organization. The vast majority of the world’s population has never heard of it. To illustrate this, in the past few months, I have told several dozen of my professional colleagues that I would be going to a meeting of the World Economic Forum. The reaction was the same from all but three: “What is the World Economic Forum?” The three who did not respond that way were all CEOs of large companies, and their response was the same: “How did you get invited?” They asked because the WEF is the classic old boys’ club. Most of the people who attend its meetings are heads of state and CEOs of major corporations. I was invited only because of this special collaborative meeting with the WHO. It’s the first meeting I have attended that had a half mile security corridor around the meeting venue and was held in a city that spent several hundred million dollars to finish construction projects in time to host the meeting. The WEF is interested in workplace wellness because its members are recognizing the crippling economic impact of skyrocketing medical costs on business and nations, have long understood the relationship between productivity and profit, and acknowledge the link between tobacco use, obesity, nutrition, and physical activity and those economic outcomes. Of course the most significant fact is that the members of the WEF have the ability to mobilize the resources of the governments of the world and the major businesses in those nations, because they are the people who run these governments and businesses.

Our collaborative meeting included a series of highly interactive brainstorming sessions on how to advance this issue to the next level and discussions of several papers commissioned for the meeting. Papers that summarized the quality of the evidence supporting workplace wellness drew the same conclusions we have trumpeted for years: There is compelling evidence on the link between lifestyle, medical conditions, and medical costs; persuasive evidence that some programs do indeed improve health, reduce costs, and enhance productivity; and very little evidence on what works best.

The next step for the WHO-WEF collaboration is to present its case for adoption of workplace wellness as a global priority at the January 2008 meeting in Davos Switzerland. If this platform is adopted, workplace wellness will move to a new stage of evolution.

Michael P. O'Donnell, PhD, MBA, MPH

References

1. The World Health Report 2002 – Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life http://www.who.int/whr/2002/en/. Accessed 9/14/2007
    
2. World Economic Forum. http://www.weforum.org. Accessed 9/14/2007