In the Be Healthy Celebration Week Lek associates worked out and took up a culinary challenge with Petra Majdič

Be Healthy is a group-wide health promotion initiative for our affiliates worldwide to support healthy lifestyles, share knowledge and prevent injury and disease that could impact associates’ personal and professional lives. Be Healthy provides voluntary opportunities for associates to take control of their personal health. »The Be Healthy program has been a great success in its first year, and Novartis sites around the world have launched many new programs to improve health and well-being as a result of the initiative,” said Joseph Jimenez, CEO of Novartis, and added: »Therefore I was really looking forward to this second Celebration Week with more than 50 countries participating worldwide.«

Move, Choose, Know, Manage

Novartis is focusing on prevention programs in Be Healthy in order to help prevent a rapid increase of non-communicable diseases with various workplace health and well-being programs addressing lifestyle changes. Each day of Be Healthy Celebration Week will focus on one of Be Healthy’s four pillars – Move, Choose, Know and Manage.

»With the Be Healthy initiative and Be Healthy Celebration Week Lek builds upon our several decades long tradition of providing health and well-being programs for associates. Through our existing activities we have developed a program which enables the associates to regularly monitor their health condition. The global Novartis initiative enabled us to bring together all programs with regard to associates’ health to date in one place and to additionally expand some of them. This year, for the second time in a row, we organised Be Healthy Celebration Week into which we incorporate our entire effort to support healthy lifestyles among our associates. Both this and last year the response of our associates was excellent,« stressed Vojmir Urlep, President of Board of Management of Lek, a Sandoz company, at the occasion of the Be Healthy Celebration Week.

Cooking challenge with Petra Majdič

One day of the Be Healthy Celebration Week was dedicated to healthy meals and snacks (Choose). The associates could choose from an additional range of healthy and balanced meals at all Lek sites. A cooking challenge with Petra Majdič attracted special attention. At each Lek site two associates cooked a meal according their own recipe from healthy ingredients selected by Petra Majdič. Petra, whilst carrying out her own cooking, talked about the importance of healthy eating, giving away some secrets about the diet of athletes and ideas on healthy snacks and answered employees’ questions.

Besides healthy eating the employees could participate during Be Healthy Celebration Week in various sports activities (Move), e.g. taking part in a morning workout in the open air with Petra Majdič, together with activities on fitness machines, and went hiking. Free measurement of key numbers such as blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and body mass index were also carried out in the Celebration Week. In addition, the associates had the opportunity to test their lung function with a spirometer (Know). A special day was dedicated to raising awareness about stress control (Manage). During the whole week, the associates were encouraged to use stairs more frequently and to limit the use of salt in their diets. Also drawn to the attention was the possibility of free psychological counselling by phone for associates at all Slovenian sites.

About Be Healthy initiative

Be Healthy has a broad reach within the Novartis Group. In 2011, 76 of the largest Novartis sites across 32 countries were involved, reaching 80% of affiliates’ associates. In 2012, the initiative was expanded to 100 additional sites and has now reached 95% of associates.

The Novartis Be Healthy Celebration Week is taking place in the same month as the World Health Organization-sponsored “Wellness Week.”

Novartis is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Workplace Wellness Alliance which puts an emphasis on health and well-being. The WEF alliance is a response to the growing burden of NCDs, the chief cause of death globally and a significant contributor to global healthcare costs. The World Health Organization recently set a global target to reduce NCDs by 25% by the year 2025, and Be Healthy is the contribution of Novartis toward this goal.