Evaluation of a workplace health promotion program to improve cardiovascular disease risk factors in sales representatives

Abstract

This study was conducted to develop and evaluate a health promotion program for sales representatives in order to improve their cardiovascular disease risk factors. The subjects were male employees working as sales representatives at a manufacturing company in Tokyo. All subjects had at least one abnormality detected in the annual health checkups, but no medication was needed to treat their abnormality. This study employed a quasi-experimental design. The intervention group consisted of 32 employees, and the control group consisted of 43 employees. The program consisted of education on nutrition, physical activity, and cardiovascular risk factors through individual counseling for 30 min by health nurses. Evaluation was conducted 6 months after the follow-up. When only the data of employees who showed an abnormal value before the intervention were analyzed, the prevalence of hyper-cholesterolemia in the intervention and control groups after intervention differed significantly ( p = 0.04) at 41.7% and 77.3%, respectively. Changes in total cholesterol from the baseline were significantly greater in the intervention group than in the control group (− 25.7 vs. − 8.7 mg/dl, p = 0.02). This study showed that a workplace health promotion program developed for sales representatives to improve cardiovascular risk factors was effective in decreasing the total cholesterol level.