Property solutions organisation Lendlease has developed a wide-ranging health and wellbeing programme, tailoring the schemes offered to reflect the results gathered from staff surveys and employee health checks.
With health check results from autumn 2013 and autumn 2015 showing that 53% of employees did not protect their skin in the sun, the organisation sought to develop an initiative to address this issue. Gemma Bourne, head of social sustainability and the Lendlease Foundation at Lendlease, says: “We wanted to raise awareness of the importance of checks and then also provide the provision to bring checks in house to give our employees access to something they wouldn’t necessarily get on the high street.”
As a result, Lendlease launched a cancer prevention measure, provided by Check4Cancer, as part of its existing health and wellbeing scheme, initially focusing on skin cancer. “After the first year of trialling it, we had to double the number of appointments available because take-up was so high,” says Bourne. “We have about 500 employees a year do [the skin cancer check], so it’s about 40% of our head count in this region.”
Off the back of this success, the organisation launched prostate checks in 2015. “Given the industry that we work in, it is predominantly male so we wanted to do something targeted around men’s health,” Bourne explains.
The targeted programme is designed for men over 40 and although the population pool is quite small, the organisation has seen 70% of applicable staff take up the prostate check.
The scheme is promoted through text messages, emails, posters and messages on the staff intranet. Bourne attributes the scheme’s success to its convenience. She says: “One of the reasons [the schemes] are so successful is because through service providers such as Check4Cancer, they are able to come to our project offices and on site so they are set up in our site cabin. We make it easy to do.”
The skin cancer checks are available at all of the organisation's offices and construction projects during the spring and summer, and the prostate cancer checks are available through the winter.
