Completing our focus on health benefits is Dr Paul Kanas who reveals the intricacies of the wellbeing schemes in place and the savings that can be made by knocking just 1% off sickness absence.

Q1 HR Zone: What does your role as head of OH at Cadbury’s involve?
Kanas: I look after the health of our workforce (7,500 within the UK) across the range of functions including manufacturing, distribution, sales and offices. I’m based at the largest manufacturing site in Bournville, where there are 3,000 staff. The occupational health (OH) role is actually very old. Cadbury’s was amongst the first businesses to have a company doctor in 1905/06 and that tradition of wellbeing has continued. I am the Head of OH, working within a multidisciplinary team of 10 and have been with the business for the last 18 years.

Q2 HR Zone: What kind of health benefits/programmes and initiatives are currently in place?
Kanas: A key initiative has been our health programme Fit for Life which has four pillars to it:

• Nutrition: we introduced food flags in our staff canteen including our five-a-day fruit and vegetable flag Take five and Fit for Life Choices which indicate foods that are low in fat, have been cooked in a healthier way and are better for you.




• Activity: Our Occupational Health Nurse Manager, Sue Ford, started a lunch-time walking group within the local area which we’ve linked to our corporate social responsibility programme. We donated money to Acorns Children’s Hospice, the walking group’s chosen charity when they had notched up 1000 miles cumulatively. We also supported National Bike Week in June, publicised it internally and offered a free breakfast to those who cycled to work that week.




• Balance and relaxation: We offered a series of lunchtime de-stressing sessions with our Counsellor, Phil Jeremiah Chill with Phil at the Bournville site and we’ve also offered Indian Head massage which has been well received.




• Personnel wellbeing: National Smoking Day happens in March, to mark this we have run a range of quit-smoking groups (they are eight week programmes). We also offer one-to-one health checks, including a Q&A on diet, exercise, smoking history, BMI, lung function and cholesterol levels.

We ran the Fit for Life scheme initially as a pilot project at Bournville and it’s now being rolled out across all our UK sites.

Q3 HR Zone: What has been the return on these initiatives?
Kanas: The food flag system has been very successful. We monitored the sales of food items and there were some dramatic changes in the foods that people were buying. Sales of skimmed milk, wholemeal bread and fruit went up for example. Out of the smokers that joined our quit-smoking group we found that those who were going to give up had done so by week three and out of that group, 60% succeeded in kicking the habit.

It’s too early to say what the long term benefits will be to our staffs overall health and wellbeing. We do anticipate that sickness absence will fall, however. We conducted a project involving 240 employees who were working on a specific business re-engineering project, working to very strict deadlines. Our Occupational Health staff collaborated with physiologists from Nuffield Proactive Health to put them through an intensive programme including an away-day on health issues and one-to-one health checks. Six months later their rates of sickness absence were very low despite the pressure they were under and the lifestyle changes they’d made including smoking patterns was very encouraging.