Healthy workplaces: a WHO global model for action

The WHO healthy workplace model: a comprehensive way of thinking and acting that addresses:

• work-related physical and psychosocial risks;
• promotion and support of healthy behaviours;
• broader social and environmental determinants.

The United Nations high-level meeting on non-communicable disease prevention and control in 2011 called on the private sector to “promote and create an enabling environment for healthy behaviours among workers, including by establishing tobacco-free workplaces and safe and healthy working environments through occupational safety and health measures, including, where appropriate, through good corporate practices, workplace wellness programmes and health insurance plans.”

WHO considers workplace health programmes as one of the best-buy options for prevention and control of non-communicable diseases and for mental health. Such programmes can help achieving the WHO objective of reducing the avoidable deaths of NCDs and the burden of mental ill health and to protect and promote health at the workplace as stipulated in the Global Plan of Action on Workers’ health 2008-2017.

The model encompasses five main criteria which are outlined in the Five Keys to Healthy Workplaces flyer.