Book Reviews |
Health and Productivity Toolkit
ACOEM Committee on Health and Productivity Chairs: Pamela Hymel and Ronald Loeppile. Published by American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2007. Price: $115 for members $165 for non-members of ACOEM. www.acoem.org. 115 pp.This toolkit is aimed at a wide audience comprising occupational health physicians, managers, health and safety staff and human resources professionals. It aims to convey a basic understanding of the principles of health and productivity management but inevitably has a very American focus.
The seven chapters cover the value of measuring health and productivity (the eternal ‘what's in it for me?’ question) and the role of the occupational health professional and also provides a checklist to assess how an organization is performing, ranging from a business which is just starting to think about health and productivity to one which is a leader in the field. Another chapter deals with the current tools available to assist in measuring health and productivity including the Stanford Presenteeism Scale.
The toolkit pulls no punches with a chapter on the challenges facing anyone who wants to measure health and productivity, but I found that the most interesting part of the whole toolkit was the simple (probably too simple) measurement of ‘estimating money at risk’ whereby common conditions are given dollar values, so the costs to individual organizations can be calculated. Of course, this is less applicable to UK businesses where companies do not pay out of their own pockets for employee medical treatment but nevertheless the finding of migraine as one of the top conditions to cause high costs through presenteeism was interesting. Perhaps for too long, we have concentrated on absence management and sickness absence rates alone and now we need to consider the impact of common health conditions on performance of people present at work.
Overall, the toolkit makes a useful introduction to the field but it would be the enthusiast or someone with occupational health responsibilities across the pond who would value it most.
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