How will your project change or improve delivery of educational programs?

To address this question, I thought about the importance of having healthy faculty and staff to deliver programs and resources. Faculty and staff who are sick, with a disease or condition, or recovering from a disease or condition cannot deliver programs.

• Employees who participate in wellness programs have lower absenteeism rates. For every $1 spent on wellness programs, an average of $3.50 is saved. (Whitmer, R.W., Pelletier, K.R., Anderson, D.R., Baase, C.M., and Frost, C.J. (2003). A wake-up call for corporate America. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 45:9,916-925.)
• For every additional risk factor that an employee has, it costs about $350 more per year. Risk factors include overweight, sedentary lifestyle, smoking, and poor nutrition. (O’Donnell, M.P. (2002). Employer’s financial perspective on workplace health promotion in Health Promotion in the workplace, 3rd ed. Albany, NY: Delmar.)
• Wellness programs can target these risk factors and reduce the chance for disease.
• Wellness programs can encourage healthy habits or educate about healthy habits.
• MU Extension cares about wellness, but it can be hard to reach regional or off-campus staff.
• We all work hard, so it's important to keep ourselves healthy and improve our well-being.
• Wellness is OUR responsibility, not the responsibility of our organization.