Health promotion in the Scottish workplace: a case for moving the goalposts

The workplace provides an important opportunity for health promotion, both in terms of allowing access to a large proportion of the adult population and encouraging developments within the workplace structure to improve health. This paper reports on the findings of a survey of Scottish workplaces carried out in 1996 for the Health Education Board for Scotland to assess the state of health promotion activity in the Scottish workplace setting. The results echo those from previous surveys in that most health promotion effort was centred around health and safety, smoking, and alcohol issues, particularly for the smaller and less well-resourced businesses. Under one-fifth of businesses surveyed addressed areas such as stress and mental health, which are being seen as increasingly important in terms of their contribution to the well-being of the employee and the organization. The main implication of these findings is that it is smaller businesses who potentially have the most to gain from workplace health promotion. In this context, the construction of relevant and sustainable health promotion programmes requires an organizational development perspective in order to encourage such businesses to regard workplace health promotion as part of good business practice.