Background: Employee wellness programs (EWPs) aim to support positive changes in employees' modifiable behavioral health risk factors for disease prevention and management.
Objective: This study described the prevalence and characteristics of EWPs in US accredited college and university campuses.
Methods: Identification of the prevalence of EWPs and programming activities offered in 3039 accredited higher education institutions/campuses, and characteristics of these institutions/campuses were conducted, mainly through searching the institution's web page.
Results: Overall, 36%of the institutions/campuses offered EWPs, with a significantly larger percentage of 4-year public colleges/universities providing EWPs and wellness programming activities than the 4-year private colleges/universities and community colleges. When limiting the institutions/campuses to 4-year colleges and universities with at least 500 employees, the percentage of these institutions/campuses offering EWPs increased to 57.7%, which was comparable to the findings in the literature. The percentage of the institutions/campuses offering wellness programming activities ranged from 18.1%for injury prevention and ergonomics to 30.2%for stress management. The percentage of institutions/campuses offering injury prevention and ergonomics was significantly lower than the percentage of institutions/campuses offering other typical wellness activities.
Conclusions: The prevalence of EWPs offered in accredited college and university campuses do not meet the national goal of 75%, which was set by Healthy People 2010.
Keywords: Workplace health promotion; cross-sectional survey; health promotion; numerical data; statistics; universities.