Corporate Health Promotion Plan Evaluation Basics

Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation is critical for effective Wellness and will help you get Upper Management support.

Why evaluate your Corporate Wellness Program?

Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation answers these questions:
• What change(s) occurred in the target population?
• ‘What’s in it’ for Upper Management?
• Are the resources that are being used worth the outcomes that are reached?
• Were Corporate Health Promotion Plan outcomes expected? (Unexpected outcomes may have occurred.)
• What Corporate Health Promotion Plan areas need improvement?

Corporate Health Promotion Plan Fact of Life:

Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation left to “chance” or until “there is time” will never happen.

• Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation should be considered as an fundamental part of the whole plan for Wellness and not as something extra.

Where do you start?

Make it Simple. Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation does not have to be complicated.
• Get baseline data.
• Baseline data is the health status of the target population at the beginning of the Corporate Wellness Program.
• Start by collecting just 3 or 4 primary items as the baseline. You will have better success collecting follow-up information later if you only need to get a few pieces of data.
• Don’t rely only on health indicators that require lab evaluation. Also use self-report information and health indicators that are measurable without lab tests.

• Collect data that relates to readiness.
• You should always be ready to communicate to leadership the ways that your Corporate Health Promotion Plan impacts readiness. Plan ahead to collect data that will demonstrate this connection.
• Think like Upper Management: what Corporate Health Promotion Plan outcomes will be important from Upper Management point of view?

• It’s never too late to incorporate Corporate Health Promotion Plan evaluation into Corporate Wellness Programs.
• If your Corporate Health Promotion Plan is already up and running and you didn’t plan for data collection ahead of time, start collecting data NOW.
• If you don’t have baseline data, then collect interim data and compare that to end-of-program data.
• Or, you can compare final Corporate Health Promotion Plan outcomes to similar initiatives elsewhere.

If you can’t make any comparisons to other data, use resources like The Community Guide (http://www.thecommunityguide.org/ ) that have already evaluated the effectiveness of Corporate Health Promotion Plan components. Compare the components of your Corporate Health Promotion Plan to those that have been proven effective elsewhere.