Collective Impact: Academic-Community Partnerships for Promoting Workplace Wellness

Introduction: A community hospital in northern New England received a significant financial endowment to promote wellness within its rural service area. The endowment supports a centralized hospital-based infrastructure with dedicated staff and a structured process.  Using community-level data, a steering committee representing a broad range of community organizations identified a shared mission of promoting healthy eating and active living, and a strategy to work together to create a culture of workplace wellness in the region. Undergraduate public health students were enlisted to collect baseline data to identify appropriate interventions and enable measurable change.

Methods: Students developed a database of all area businesses. The standardized Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Worksite Health ScoreCards survey was piloted and subsequently administered to participating employers. The survey captures information about implemented evidence-based health promotion interventions. Data were imported into STATA, providing a region-wide data set, and analyzed.  

Results: Findings identified existing assets and gaps in region-wide workplace wellness programs, enabling the development of collective resource and cost-sharing strategies among regional businesses. Survey data provide standard baseline measures enabling evaluation of collective improvement at the regional level over time.

Discussion: This wellness initiative applied the collective impact framework across several systems: the student research team, the wellness initiative executive steering committee, regional employers and the greater community of the hospital service area. This project fostered capacity in employers, employees, the community, and professional development of students, and set the foundation for future initiatives.