Question

Evaluation tool: Survey on a wellness program over back pain within the office.

How you will implement the evaluation: Here you will include the actual logistics of evaluating your population using the item you developed. At what point in your program will you need to evaluate? How will you spread awareness of the importance of the evaluation? (5 points)

Answer 1

For many office workers, physical pain is a serious. This misperception can lead office workers to ignore or undertreat their pain until it interferes with their ability to do their job.

Chronic pain, or pain that affects a person’s life for a longer period of time than it would be normally expected to heal (usually more than three months), can disrupt an office worker’s mood, sleep, attitude, social life, emotional health and work productivity.

As employers today place a spotlight on chronic health conditions, addressing pain in the workplace should be a key component of any wellness initiative. Employers can start by better understanding key pain triggers and equipping office workers with the knowledge and tools they need to prevent and ease pain at work.

First, it enables you to determine program outcomes and accomplishments, thus justifying the program’s existence. Second, it helps you determine how to allocate your budget so you can focus your time and resources on meaningful programming. Last, evaluation is important because it provides you with tangible evidence that you can share with your employees, clients.

Impact evaluation focuses on the immediate observable effects of a program leading to intended outcomes. Variables include employees’ behavior and risk factors, as well as tracking incidents and injury trends. Impact evaluations also look at cause-effect. That is are the changes that occurred attributed to the program that was implemented?

Outcome evaluation is focused on an ultimate goal or product of a program, generally measured by financial outcomes and increasingly through biometric (BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol)health outcomes. It includes risk factor-based medical costs, absenteeism-based lost productivity costs, injury-based workers’ compensation and disability-driven rehabilitation costs.