New Mexico Starts Wellness Program for State Employees
The wellness program aims to increase work-life balance and pursue a healthy lifestyle for the state’s 17,000 government employees.
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- Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an executive order requiring the state to offer health and wellness programs to state employees.
The goal is to help employees achieve work-life balance and practice a healthy lifestyle.
“A healthy person is a productive person,” Governor Lujan Grisham said. “I want our employees to know they are valued, and I want prospective employees to know the state of New Mexico, as an employer, is conscientious of and responsive to their needs as human beings. Providing for exercise time and encouraging healthy habits is an important move in building and sustaining our workforce. And to state employees: I’ll see you at the gym!”
Unlike many states in the US, New Mexico’s top causes of death are not cancer and heart disease. Instead, New Mexicans suffer from fatal, unintentional injuries including those caused by drug overdose, motor vehicles, and seniors’ falls.
New Mexico’s death rate due to alcoholism is over two times the national average and its alcohol-related injury deaths are at 1.6 times the national rate. Alcohol use also leads to drug overdoses and chronic disease.
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To combat this, the state’s government employee health and wellness program will provide resources to educate the state’s over 17,000 employees on alcohol and drug abuse.
The program will increase employee awareness about various health conditions and conducting risk appraisals, though they have not yet clarified which conditions they will target first. It will also provide screenings for blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
The program will address the high rate of injury by offering illness and injury prevention training programs.
Lastly, it will cover traditional health, fitness, and wellness needs such as exercise programs.
The State Personnel Office will develop fitness and wellness guidelines and provide resources for state agencies and departments. Each state department and agency must offer a health and wellness program to their employees that implements work-life balance. State employees who participate in the programs must follow certain guidelines provided by the state.
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The State Personnel Office will continue to improve the program and add additional resources for state employees going forward.
“This important initiative is another way the governor is showing all of us: state employees are government’s most important resource, and their well-being matters,” said State Personnel Office Director Pam Coleman. “When they are healthier, the state is healthier. The State Personnel Office looks forward to working with agencies to help them implement this program.”
Local and state governments have been quietly leading the way in providing employees with steady access to wellness care programs.
A study from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics compared access to wellness programs for state and local government employees versus those employed by the private sector.
Overall, those employed by a government body were far more likely to have access to benefits such as smoking cessation programs, exercise programs, nutrition education, physical examinations, lifestyle assessments, or other benefits.
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Sixty-three percent of state and local workers had access to such wellness programs, compared to only 39 percent of private industry employees who could say the same.
Furthermore, there were disparities in wellness program access for private sector employees, with variations by field and by income.
There was a 33 percent access gap between private workers in service occupations as opposed to those in professional and related occupations. In government, the gap was seven percentage points, with access still reaching well over 50 percent for both service and professional occupations.
In the private sector, the less of an income a worker received, the less they were likely to have access to a wellness program. Those in the lowest 10 percent income category had a 15 percent chance of wellness program accessibility, while those in the highest 10 percent had a 63 percent chance of having such programs available.
In state and local governments, more individuals in the lower wage category had access to care than in the highest wage category. In the lowest 10 percent wage category, 56 percent had access to wellness programs and among the highest 10 percent, the chance of having a wellness program decreased by two percentage points.
The state programs’ consistent access to wellness care does not mean that workers necessarily utilize these programs, nor does it reflect quality. Government programs may experience the same turbulent patient engagement that the private sector faces, where effectiveness and expense often conflict with each other.
However, as employers better identify the link between wellness programs and healthcare costs, access to wellness programs will hopefully stabilize across the private sector and access to programs statistics from private employers and from local and state governments will begin to look the same.
