A systematic review of the effectiveness of health promotion interventionsin the workplace

The aim of this study was to identify and critically review evaluations of the effectiveness of health promotion programmes in the workplace, In line with guidelines for 'good practice' within the literature on workplace heal th promotion, this study aimed to assess the extent to which evaluated inte rventions considered employees' expressed needs or involved employee-employ er partnerships, Overall, 110 outcome evaluations were located. Only a quar ter of these reported that interventions were implemented in response to th e explicit needs and/or views of the employees and very few involved partne rships. Most of the programmes targeted individual behaviour and supportive organizational change was limited. The majority of the outcome evaluations were not sufficiently rigorous to make a strong case for the effectiveness of workplace health promotion. However, some pointers to success were iden tified. It was concluded that there seems to be a wide disparity between wh at counts as 'good practice' within workplace health promotion and what is reported in the evaluation of effectiveness literature. This is not to say that 'good practice' does not exist, but that either such programmes are no t rigorously evaluated for their effectiveness and/or that many of the eval uation findings remain outside the public domain.