ActionToQuit NY
Building a healthier workforce
Visit the ActionToQuit website to learn more
Creating organizational culture supporting a high performing workforce in a high performing workplace. Healthy productive employees are an important cornerstone of high performing organizational culture.
Cost to Benefit:
The personal and material costs of maintaining an unhealthy workforce are growing at an unsustainable pace.
One of the most devastating drains on life and productivity is tobacco use and dependence. The benefits of proactively addressing tobacco use impact employee wellness, corporate profit and sustainable policy.
Savings:
Cost analyses have shown that tobacco use cessation benefits are cost-saving for employers. The reduction tobacco use related healthcare costs exceed the funds required to develop, implement, and maintain tobacco use intervention programs.
Because employees spend a significant portion of their waking hours on the job,employers are in a position to positively influence lifestyles. Employer sponsored tobacco use cessation incentives, interventions, and programs can provide the supportive environment and structure people need to maintain healthy behaviors. Ultimately, healthy behaviors save lives and money.
Resolving Disparity:
Many employer health benefits plans cover preventive services such as mammography, Pap tests, childhood immunizations as well as pharmacological treatment for mild to moderate hypertension and high cholesterol. Employers should also provide coverage for tobacco use screening, cessation counseling, and medications.
Evidence-based employee benefits for tobacco use cessation will result in one of the most cost-effective preventive health services that can be offered to employees.
Easy and Effective:
Aligning health plan benefits and corporate policy with the evidence base, effective tobacco use interventions are both easy and effective. More and more agencies are discovering the need to effectively engage tobacco use and dependence among employees.
The following employers and health plans agreed to participate in the NYS ActionToQuit Leaders’ Initiative is a FREE program sponsored by Partnership for Prevention and the NYS Smokers’ Quitline encouraging NYS employers and health plans to adopt programs and policies which promote smoking cessation and benefit access to their employees and/or their members.
Each of the organizations agreed to adopt at least 3 of the policies and/or program options listed below over the next 12 months:
Offer lower health care premiums to those who do not smoke
or increase employer health insurance premium contribution for
non-smokers
Offer incentives that encourage smokers to make a quit
attempt for joining an evidence-based cessation program
Remove incentives that promote continued smoking
such as allowing smoking breaks and smoking huts
Eliminate co-pays for accessing evidence-based treatment
cessation services, including Nicotine Replacement Therapy
and non-nicotine medications
Provide evidence based stop smoking services to employees
at the workplace
Extend tobacco use cessation benefits and services to
family members
Promote available cessation treatments to employees such as the NYS Smokers’ Quitline,
1-866-NY-QUITS (1-866-697-8487) through newsletters, e-mails, intranet, and other communication venues
Grantees:
- Kingston Hospital
- Syracuse Housing Authority
- Rochester Midland Corporation
- Innovative Solutions
- Brooks Memorial
- Benedictine Hospital
- Woodland Pond of New Paltz
- CXtec
Leaders’ Initiative:
- HealthNow Blue Cross Blue Shield of WNY & Blue Shield of NENY
- Gold Choice/ Healthy Partners
- Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan
- MVP Health Plan