Purpose: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated the Work@Health Program to teach employers how to improve worker health using evidence-based strategies. Program goals included (1) determining the best way(s) to deliver employer training, (2) increasing employers' knowledge of workplace health promotion (WHP), and (3) increasing the number of evidence-based WHP interventions at employers' worksites. This study is one of the few to examine the effectiveness of a program designed to train employers how to implement WHP programs.
Design: Pre- and posttest design.
Setting: Training via 1 of 3 formats hands-on, online, or blended.
Participants: Two hundred six individual participants from 173 employers of all sizes.
Intervention: Eight-module training curriculum to guide participants through building an evidence-based WHP program, followed by 6 to 10 months of technical assistance.
Measures: The CDC Worksite Health ScoreCard and knowledge, attitudes, and behavior survey.
Analysis: Descriptive statistics, paired t tests, and mixed linear models.
Results: Participants' posttraining mean knowledge scores were significantly greater than the pretraining scores (61.1 vs 53.2, P < .001). A year after training, employers had significantly increased the number of evidence-based interventions in place (47.7 vs 35.5, P < .001). Employers' improvements did not significantly differ among the 3 training delivery formats.
Conclusion: The Work@Health Program provided employers with knowledge to implement WHP interventions. The training and technical assistance provided structure, practical guidance, and tools to assess needs and select, implement, and evaluate interventions.
Keywords: employer training; evidence-based health promotion interventions; training evaluation; training models; workplace health promotion.