Brighton and Hove organisations join forces to improve health awareness

Five organisations in Brighton and Hove worked together for a day last week to help workers look at ways to improve their health.

Advice workers from Albion in the Community, the Claude Nicol sexual health clinic, CRI (Crime Reduction Initiatives), the Employee Advice Programme and NHS Stop Smoking took part.

They set up stalls and drop-in clinics for staff at one of Brighton’s biggest employers, Domestic & General, the customer contact centre in Queen Square.

More than 200 staff were offered free chlamydia screening, stop smoking kits and stress management packs and were asked to fill in questionnaires.

As well as helping individual members of staff, the advisers will use the information from the questionnaires to help the NHS understand local people’s lifestyle and drinking habits.

Nicki Perry, Domestic & General’s HR manager, has built an extensive health and wellbeing programme within the business, which currently employs more than 700 people in Brighton.

She said: “We don’t want to put people off healthier living by telling them what they can and can’t do.

“Instead we want to give our employees the information they need to make their own informed decisions.

“The organisations involved in Health Awareness Day all have a friendly, non-preachy approach which really resonates well.

 “It’s good to know that by working with these groups, not only do our employees benefit but we’re also helping to inform decision-making that affects the wider community.”

In two years Domestic & General’s range of wellbeing initiatives helped cut staff sickness in half while employee retention increased by 35 per cent.

The company recently won the Healthiest Workplace Award at the Sussex Business Awards for the second year running.