Competitors Unite For A Healthy Cause

MEDIA RELEASE 29 MAY 2008

Competitors Unite For A Healthy Cause

Inspire Group et al develops innovative health and safety management programme

It’s not everyday that businesses team up with their competitors to assist with the development of a system that will be implemented across an entire industry.

Remarkably a core team of forward thinkers, with a concern for the wellbeing of employees in the financial and retail service sector made this happen, with an incredible idea and brilliant technology.

Inspire Group, ACC, plus representatives from banks around the country - ASB, Westpac, BNZ, ANZ National, and New Zealand Post - worked collectively, with the goal to improve the wellbeing of all employees in the financial and retail sector by minimising the potential for discomfort, pain or injury found in back pain and gradual process injuries.

ASB, Westpac, BNZ, ANZ National and New Zealand Post all have an early reporting discomfort programme where a workstation assessment or physiotherapy sessions can be organised before the reported problem gets worse. If the discomfort is not dealt with quickly and efficiently, it may progress and end up as significant pain or even an injury. Claims for pain may not be covered by ACC (if no actual injury is present), which is a huge frustration for employees.

With the ACC tool HabitAtWork in its infancy, the banks and New Zealand Post collectively approached Inspire Group to help design a user friendly software programme for use across the entire financial and retail service sector. It needed to be a programme capable of being personalised to each companies brand requirements and be accessed by staff internally. It needed to have guidelines on how to address all of the seven groups of contributory factors that combine and may cause discomfort pain and injury - rather than simply addressing workstation set up in isolation.

Shaun Sheldrake from Inspire Group comments; “ACC’s HabitAtWork initiative was launched in 2006 to assist employees in any industry to manage their workplace and minimise discomfort, pain and injury. In some parts of the financial and retail service sector however, access to HabitAtWork is limited. Our challenge was to integrate the various early reporting programme initiatives into the HabitAtWork structure and make one easy-to-use programme, accessible on each of the companies intranet systems, and personalised to suit the respective brand.”

“Due for implementation across the institutions in late May, employees will now be empowered to assess many different factors that have the potential to cause them discomfort, pain or injury. This will reduce the need for calling in outside assistance, thus saving time, money, increasing productivity and more importantly reducing employee discomfort – an inspired solution all round” comments Lorraine Gardner Wood from ACC.

ENDS

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