Healthy Settings

Last updated: 29 March 2023

View the Healthy Workplaces programme

View the Healthy Schools programme

Project aims and objectives

The aim of the Healthy Settings project was to create a way for local organisations, such as businesses and schools, to become healthier.

An organisation can sign up for our awards programme to receive support from our Public Health department in improving the health and wellbeing of employees or students (or both). They commit to different pledges and upload evidence of their actions as they move through the award stages of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

Completing an award has helped organisations to meet objectives like reducing sickness and absence or improving their impact on climate change.

What we did

Workshop

We held a workshop with Public Health to find out what their requirements were. They had already designed the awards programme and were testing it with some organisations using emails and spreadsheets as tools to track progress. They needed a way to scale the offering by streamlining and automating their processes.

Design

The Digital Team had a design day where we discussed the requirements and mapped out what a good user journey would look like. We came up with:

• webpages on medway.gov.uk that both inform and market the awards programme
• an online form for organisations to register their interest
• workflow for Public Health to mark an organisation as eligible and start a Bronze Award
• online forms to allow organisations to start other award levels (after completing bronze) by picking their pledges from pre-determined categories and creating pledges specific to them
• the use of an online account for organisations to upload their evidence of achieving pledges and track their progress
• automated emails sent between the organisation and Public Health as actions happen, for example if new evidence is uploaded
• digital documents, such as certificates, that could be pre-populated with organisation data instead of being manually edited each time
• an online members area containing resources and support that can only be accessed by organisations completing an award.

Build and test

We decided we could use existing technology called Jadu to meet our and user’s needs.

We spent some time exploring the online organisation account to make sure it was fit for purpose, as we had not used this facility before.

We then spent a few months building our designs and extensively testing them with Public Health before the service was implemented.

Measure of success

The end result is an online service that allows an organisation to sign up for the awards programme and progress all the way through to completion of a Platinum Award – making them a much healthier place to work or be educated in.

As of March 2023, over 300 organisations had signed up to the awards programme.

We have received positive feedback from some of them, such as:
 

 “The local award has helped us to see what we are already doing and give us new areas to focus on.”
Stuart Clack, Electrical Technician at National Grid

“Having a staff wellbeing offer and promoting a healthy workplace environment has helped how we manage our small team and recruit staff.”
Matt Dean, Director of Lustre Consulting Limited

Our Public Health Team are also pleased. They believe the online service has increased the conversion rate of organisations joining the award, because it is easy for them to upload evidence in one place.

Using a case management system to view evidence, communicate with organisations, update awards and generate digital documents has also saved them hours of work for each organisation that takes part compared to previous manual methods.