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Marking the 100th year since the organizations founding, Girl Scouts has declared 2012 the Year of the Girl. In an initiative that focuses on the future for girls, Texas Instruments recently partnered with 
Novartis celebrates employee health globally
After the successful 2011 launch of its worldwide, company-wide health and well-being initiative in September, Novartis is working to expand Be Healthy Celebration Week in 2012 to involve more than 95 percent of all Novartis affiliates’ associates at more than 150 locations.
Novartis provides health care solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies around the world. The inaugural Be Healthy Celebration Week, which occurred September 19-23, demonstrated Novartis’ belief that good health care starts with its own employees. Be Healthy helps Novartis associates take an active role in managing their own health and is a natural extension of the company purpose to “care and cure.”
Novartis rolled out Be Healthy to 76 locations in 32 countries, including Brazil, India, Spain, the United States, Switzerland, China and Indonesia, according to Julie Masow a Novartis spokesperson. The program reached 80 percent of Novartis affiliates’ associates worldwide.
Each day of Be Healthy Celebration Week focused on one of Be Healthy’s four pillars — Move, Choose, Know and Manage. Each pillar provided Novartis associates with information, activities and education to lead healthier lives. The goal of the initiative is to support Novartis affiliates worldwide in healthy lifestyles, to share knowledge and to help reduce associates’ risk of injury and disease that could devastatingly impact their personal and professional lives.
Masow pointed out that “although the standards for the types of activities that sites should put in place are universal across Novartis, sites have the freedom to implement the activities in a way that makes the most sense in their particular culture and location.” For example, as part of Be Healthy, sites are asked to put in place sports teams and competitions that encourage people to move more. “Associates decide what kind of team to establish so teams have ranged from traditional sports like soccer and badminton, to more unusual activities like surfing and hula hoop,” Masow said. She pointed out that “we even had a site that organized a photography club where the members walked around the town talking pictures.”
Feedback received so far from employees has been very positive. During Be Healthy Celebration Week, Novartis established a blog where associates could post their thoughts on the program and Masow said there were a number of moving stories. She recalled that one colleague in India was invited to deliver a talk on “How to Stop Smoking” after having smoked for more than 30 years. He has now taken a vow to help at least one person become a nonsmoker by year’s end. Another associate posted that she “started the week by running a Novartis 5K with her 8-year-old daughter and packing healthy brown bag lunches for her children to take to school.”
In order to make the initiative successful, Novartis set up a dedicated Be Healthy team, which included representatives from most departments. A monitoring and evaluation plan was also put in place to track implementation and improve program offerings, Masow explained. In 2011, more than half of the sites were audited in person by a member of the corporate Be Healthy Team who tracked compliance and offered support and best practices to site implementation teams, according to Masow.
Masow emphasized that the initiative is “strongly supported by our leadership team” and is an internal initiative established solely for the benefit of Novartis Group Company associates.
Novartis is focusing on prevention programs in Be Healthy because statistics from the World Economic Forum show that workplace health and well-being programs addressing lifestyle changes can help prevent up to 40 percent of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and lung disorders. The Novartis Be Healthy Celebration Week coincided with the WHO sponsored “Wellness Week” and the United Nations High Level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases. Masow observed that the joint time frame of these events helped Novartis “emphasize and magnify the overall message about the importance of improving health and well-being worldwide.”
