A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF THE EFFECTS OF WORKSITE HEALTH PROMOTION ONHEALTH-RELATED OUTCOMES

Purpose. This article provides the foundation for a series of literatu re reviews that critically examine the effectiveness of worksite healt h promotion programs. This issue reviews the exercise, health risk app raisal, nutrition and cholesterol, and weight control literatures; a f uture issue will review the alcohol, HIV/AIDS, multicomponent program seat belt, smoking, and stress management literatures. Methods. The li terature search used a four-step process that included a computerized database search, a reference search, a manual search of relevant healt h promotion journals, and the writing of the review by a recognized ex pert in the area being searched. The databases were searched from 1968 through 1994 and included Medline, Aidsline, Psychological Abstracts, Combined Health Information Database, Employee Benefits Infosource, N ational Prevention Evaluation Research Collection, National Resource C enter on Worksite Health Promotion, National Technical Information Ser vice and the Substance Abuse Information database. A total of 288 arti cles were identified by the search, not including the 37 articles in t he hypertension literature. Authors of each review were requested to i ncorporate additional studies not identified by the search, provide a research rating for each individual article, and a rating for the over all literature for their respective area. The authors reviewed 316 stu dies. Findings. The overall ratings for the reviews reported in this i ssue were suggestive for exercise, weak for health risk appraisals, su ggestive/indicative for both nutrition and cholesterol, and indicative for weight control. The ratings for the other reviews will be reporte d in the subsequent issue. Conclusions. Research reported in these rev iews suggests the effectiveness of worksite health promotion programs, however, additional research is required to provide conclusive eviden ce of their impact.