The Tasmanian Government in partnership with the Menzies Research Institute, as well as several UTAS schools, today received $856,000 from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to assess the effectiveness of a major workplace health and wellbeing initiative, the Healthy@Work program.

The Tasmanian Government in partnership with the Menzies Research Institute, as well as several UTAS schools, today received $856,000 from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to assess the effectiveness of a major workplace health and wellbeing initiative, the Healthy@Work program.

Workplaces are increasingly being used as important settings for health promotion interventions to improve health, prevent chronic disease, and improve workforce productivity.

Chief Investigator, Menzies' Associate Professor Alison Venn said that the Partnership Project aims to review the effectiveness of the Healthy@Work program currently being delivered to all Tasmanian State Service employees and to guide the development of future programs.

"This Partnership Project will combine the expertise of investigators from the Menzies Research Institute and University of Tasmania with health and policy practitioners in the Tasmanian Government," Associate Professor Venn said.

"The project will address nationally significant questions on the feasibility, effectiveness, and sustainability of workplace health promotion across a large workforce that is occupationally diverse and distributed widely across the state," she said.

Minister for Health Lara Giddings said the Healthy@Work program was established by the Tasmanian Government in 2008 to provide health and wellbeing initiatives in the government sector to improve nutrition and increase physical activity, as well as help in addressing issues such as smoking, alcohol and stress.

"The aim of this project is to significantly strengthen the research and evaluation effort of the Healthy@Work program and to develop new projects that will ultimately improve the health and productivity of the State Service workforce," Ms Giddings said.

"We're excited to be working with Menzies and the University of Tasmania to provide unique higher degree training opportunities in public health research.

"From this, we would like to develop new collaborative projects that are methodologically rigorous and address important policy objectives, and in the long term, to offer this program to workplaces in the private sector."

This announcement of this funding highlights the strong ongoing partnership between the University of Tasmania, Menzies and the Tasmanian Government. 

The collaboration also involves the UTAS School of Management, School of Psychology School of Sociology, School of Human Movement and the School of Computing & Information Systems.

The grant will be administered through the Menzies Research Institute over a five year period.

Released by:

Fiona Horwood
Communications Manager
Menzies Research Institute
Telephone:(03) 6226 7751

Contact:

Phone:

Email: