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By Dan McKeever
Dr. Boyd Lyles, corporate medical director at U.S. Preventive Medicine, offers a number of steps that employers can take to help workers avoid heart attacks.
These include providing an employee-friendly portal to preventive health care, including health risk assessments and health coaching. He also urges employers to offer health care benefits that encourage prevention and create a cultural expectation of wellness in the office.
"People, by nature, do not seek out medical care when they don't feel bad. They don't want the possibility of getting bad news or to be told that they should be doing things that they don't want to do, such as eating differently, drinking less alcohol, not smoking or exercising more regularly," Lyles explains.
Employers can also create a library of information about preventable medical conditions (including heart attacks) for employees to use, or implement themed months or weeks with a focus on preventive medicine, he adds.
"Everyone, including employers, must focus more attention on prevention, and not simply treating illnesses when they occur," Lyles contends. "[T]he success of any prevention or health awareness program requires that it start at the top. Corporate benefit and human resource managers should help ensure that their senior management is engaged and committed to the effort for it to be successful."
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