Workplace health

In recent years, workplace health has emerged as a key corporate responsibility issue and we've been at the forefront of the drive to engage the wider business community  through our leadership of  the Business in the Community Business Action on Health campaign.

In 2005 we created the Boots Healthy Workplace Team to drive this agenda, engage the leaders of the business and report progress. This is a cross-functional group of dedicated individuals who can ensure alignment with our business plans, policies and practices as well as sharing awareness, knowledge and skills from different areas of the business to the benefit of our people.

Some past successes have been:

• Creation of a healthy workplace brand – My Health
• Integration of workplace health activity with the company's marketing campaigns for customers.
• ‘Change one Thing’ campaign People Packs. These contained health information, free engagement tools such as a pedometer, healthy fruit snack and details of how to sign up to a people programme for extra support on getting fit or giving up smoking.
• Confirmation from our people that the areas they wanted support with are: exercise, healthy eating/weight loss, stopping smoking and work/life balance.
• Winning a Government Health and Wellbeing Award for our activities.

Future focus of activities:

During 2009, we've reviewed our approach to workplace health. Based on doing just a few things really well, we've decided to focus our activity on three key areas.  This is to further the successes of the past and address developing concerns within business/society in general and part of our industry in particular:

• Raising mental health awareness
• Developing opportunities to provide professional pharmacy services to our people
• Looking to understand better the causes of stress within specific business functions.