Member Article

Businesses urged to keep healthy

North East businesses are being encouraged to focus on ensuring employees are healthy at work. To coincide with Mental Health Action Week (23 - 29 March), employment relations service Acas has launched a new guide to help businesses promote and manage a healthy workplace.

Statistics from the Mental Health Foundation show that 112,000 people in the North East suffered from an illness which they believed was caused or made worse by their work. Available online at www.acas.org.uk, ‘Health, work and wellbeing in the workplace’ offers advice to businesses, HR managers, and employees.

Mental Health Action Week this year addresses anger. Every year three in ten employees experience mental health problems and it is estimated stress related sick leave costs the UK industry £370 million every year or approximately 91 million working days.

Areas covered in the new Acas guide include:

• How to recognise health problems with your employees
• What makes a healthy workplace
• A health, work and wellbeing checklist
• Further sources of expert information on health, work and wellbein

Wendy Parker, Area Director with Acas North East, said: “Creating a healthy workplace has strong benefits for individuals and organisations. This guide will help businesses to ensure that measures are taken to look after its employees, which in turn will boost productivity and effectiveness. “If businesses can take steps to manage ill-health - physical and mental - then they will save money and have happier employees.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .