A quasi-experimental research design is used to evaluate Carolina Healthstyle, a health promotion project for South Carolina state employees. A 10% stratified random sample of employees was surveyed in the Spring of 1983 and again in 1984. Eighteen agencies were intervention agencies and the rest comparison that year. This article reports changes with simple before-after comparisons in the intervention agencies and matched pair analysis and randomized block designs to compare intervention and comparison agencies. Results are reported for smoking, exercise safety, nutrition, stress, and alcohol. Significant increases in exercise were found in both intervention and comparison agencies. The number of smokers decreased in intervention from 30%-26% with no change in comparison agencies. Safety practices changed at similar rates in both intervention and comparison groups. Consumption of chicken increased significantly only in the intervention agencies. Few other diet or stress changes were found. There were changes in alcohol consumption in intervention agencies only. The presence of the comparison group helps to separate the program effects from secular trends.
Collaboration between schools of public health and communities is essential to creating healthier communities. Community-Campus Partnerships for Health has established a policy agenda that recognizes the importance of supporting the connection of community engagement with the traditional components of the mission of academic institutions: teaching, research, and service. 1 "Communities" have been defined by Green, Daniel, and Novick as not only localities but also "groups that have a common interest or cause even if they do not share a common location." 2 In this sense, community partners may represent volunteers, agencies, or organizations in the public or private sectors. 2 This view of communities as important collaborators in efforts to improve the public health also is evident in the 2003 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century. 3 The report emphasizes the "intersectorial" nature of the public health system, noting that the governmental public health infrastructure is the "backbone of the public health system" and is complemented by other public health system sectors including the health care delivery system and academic public health. 3 The report calls attention to the importance of communities, the business sector, and the media as potential public health system actors and acknowledges that "individuals, communities, and varied social institutions can form powerful collaborative efforts to improve health that government cannot replicate." 3 Collaboration with communities defined by locality as well as communities defined by common interest is
Employee health promotion programs, first developed for private business and industry, are being extended to governmental employees. South Carolina established a pilot health promotion program in 1982 for 20,000 state employees in the area surrounding Columbia, the state capital. In 1985, the Carolina Healthstyle program was institutionalized as an employee benefit, extended statewide, and was broadened to include all school district employees and state retirees. This article describes the Carolina Healthstyle program in school worksites as it is being implemented by one pilot school district, with a briefer description of the organization, funding, and evaluation of the overall state employee wellness program. The article describes contributions that schoolsite wellness programs can make to increase positive health behaviors of staff, parents, and community as part of the movement to achieve the health goals of the nation.
The use of a volunteer model in the provision of health promotion programs in the public sector is described based on the experiences of the Carolina Healthstyle Project, originally a health promotion project for state employees in the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area and now expanding to all state employees, public school district employees, and, in a more limited fashion, to state government retirees. The revised models for this project may be particularly helpful to other modestly-funded health promotion efforts.
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