Employees' perception of workplace health promotion initiatives in Taiwan: a cross-sectional survey of 30 worksites

Abstract

The present study was to describe the input/process and evaluate the effectiveness of Taiwanese Workplace Health Promotion Initiatives based on employees' perspectives. This study employed a cross-sectional design by a structured questionnaire that was completed by 842 employees in 30 workplaces that participated in the Taiwan Workplace Health Promotion (WHP) Initiatives which supported by Ministry of Health from 2004 to 2006. The results found that the employees generally agreed that WHP improved their personal health skills. There was a lower level of agreement with respect to other input/process domains such as workplace healthy policy, workplace supportive health environments and WHP activities and services and the WHP effectiveness. With regard to the prediction of WHP effectiveness, the domain of workplace health activities/services could only predict 50.5% of the variation of the effectiveness in a regression model. Three domains of workplace - health activities/services, personal health skills and supportive health environments - were significantly correlated to the agree level of health promotion effectiveness. The results suggest that companies that intend initiating health promotion programs need to conduct a detailed assessment of the nature of the workplace settings and the perceptions of employees.