Healing the Work Place: Wellness Initiative Programs for the City of Marietta.

Due to the increase in health care costs and its impact on both employers and employees, the City of Marietta is interested in the wellness programs and how it can be implemented because they serve as good alternatives to reducing health care costs. Thus my main project is to research on the wellness programs, their implementation in other cities, how successful they were and to analyze their cost/benefit and cost-effectiveness in the cities of Lagrange and Atlanta. Wellness programs consist of a combination of activities designed to increase awareness, assess risks, educate and promote voluntary behavior change to improve the health of a group, modify their consumer health behavior, enhance their personal well-being and productivity, and prevent illness and injury. Employee wellness program opportunities can be offered both at and away from the worksite. I chose the health and wellness programs of the City of LaGrange and Atlanta as case studies because of their success in terms of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefits. After these Cities experienced tremendous increase in employees’ health care costs, they opted for the creation and the implementation of a well designed wellness programs which has helped lower the cost of insurance claims. The City of Lagrange and Atlanta are considered pioneers in Health and Wellness Programs, thus I reviewed and compared the different Wellness Programs they have implemented and I made some recommendations on the Wellness programs the City of Marietta can implement based on their employees’ health issues.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Public Administration (MPA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Year dc:date.available

2009

Author dc:creator

• Ololade, Odulesi

• Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/etd/3

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu:etd-1007