Summary of 'Creating healthier workplaces - How can industry be part of the solution?'
Health in the workplace is an important arena for the Oxford Health Alliance in terms of the impact that it can have on the overall health of a workforce and beyond.
As part of our workplace health initiative, the Oxford Health Alliance and PepsiCo UK held an event at Magdalen College Oxford, in June 2008, co-hosted by Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, and Salman Amin, President, PepsiCo UK.
The guest speaker was Dr Susan Jebb OBE, Head of Nutrition and Health Research at the Medical Research Council, and advisor to the Department of Health on Obesity. Dr Jebb framed the discussion around several points and the conversations that followed centred around these points:
- Do employers have a mandate for intervention? If so how far are companies prepared to go?
- How do we identify interventions with the best chance of success?
- Is there a moral framework in which employees should act?
- How do we evaluate the impact of industry action – both on employees and the wider community? How can that impact be utilised to make companies do more?
Among those attending were representatives from business, including Sainsbury's, BT, BUPA, and PricewaterhouseCoopers; the NGO world, including the Work Foundation; government and its partners, including the Department for Work and Pensions and Natural England; and academics from Oxford and other universities including Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The event offered an opportunity for people to meet, share various ideas and perspectives and find common ground in the area of workplace health.
I enjoyed the evening very much... [I] was quite taken with the range of very influential leaders that you brought together to share views/ideas – many quite out of the ordinary to the usual conferences/workshops that I attend – so it has certainly increased my engagement. I believe it is precisely these types of functions that add to the momentum of awareness of evidence and push consciences to start believing/doing!!