MOH first to count steps towards healthy lifestyle

19 May 2004

Promoting a healthy lifestyle is one of the Ministry of Health (MOH)'s eight priorities, be it in one's personal life or at the workplace.  As part of our continuing efforts to promote a more active and healthier lifestyle among its staff, MOH will introduce the first workplace's Step-With-It (SWI) program on 19th May 2004.  MOH will also launch an internal health database and website for its staff as a tool to assist them in monitoring their personalised health status and health reward points whenever they participate in any healthy lifestyle activities.

SWI Program

MOH  is the first workplace in Singapore to implement this program.

All of its 400 staff will be given their personal stepometer to monitor their step counts. To help and encourage them to achieve and exceed the daily target of 10,000 steps, the MOH Health Promotion Committee (HPC) is initiating several healthy lifestyle initiatives within MOH HQ itself:-

• Increasing our monthly ACTIVE days to fortnightly ACTIVE days, including some high-impact exercises such as bodycombat and kickboxing.

• Organising inter-divisional and inter-institutional sports events

• Starting a variety of sports clubs with regular weekly activities such as jogging, bowling, badminton, table tennis clubs, etc

• Participating in external sports events such as JP Morgan, The New paper Big Walk, Singapore Marathon, etc

Incentives in the form of rewards and prizes will also be awarded to staff who manage to achieve the target or highest number of steps over designated periods of the program. Divisions whose staff total the highest total number of steps would also be awarded prizes.

The SWI Program is a 12-month programme jointly launched by Changi General Hospital, F&N Coca-Cola and Planet Fitness. For more details about the SWI Program, please refer to Annex A

Employee Health Database

Monitoring of personal health status

This web-based database system  is designed to store health-related information for all staff in MOH HQ. Staff will be able to view and/or update their own health-related details.  This includes their personal health profile and results of annual health screenings or any regular health checks, conducted either by their own specialists/GPs or through our monthly lunch time sessions. The staff will thus be able to track and monitor their personal health profile.  The Ministry could also use the data to implement certain targeted intervention programmes, as well as monitor the effect of such programmes on the health profile of our staff.

Online recording and tracking of SWI step-count

The database system has also been customized to allow staff to key-in their step-counts obtained from the SWI program on a daily basis. Staff would then be able to track how well they are progressing in terms of achieving their daily target number of steps.

'MOH Healthy Lifestyle Reward Points' (HRP)

With the increased number of healthy lifestyle activities in the coming year and to encourage greater staff participation in these activities, the MOH HQ HPC has formulated a reward points system known as the 'MOH Healthy Lifestyle Reward Points' (HRP).

The HRPs will be monitored electronically through the Employee Health Database system. Staff will be issued HRPs for participation in HPC activities (E.g. Bi-monthly ACTIVE Days, health talks, internal/external sports events, etc). The accumulated HRPs can then be redeemed online through the system for a range of gifts and vouchers.

"Do as we do, get up and get fit!"

The Ministry is committed to actively promoting healthy lifestyle among Singaporeans, and will strive to walk the talk. We want to urge Singaporeans to "Do as we do, get up and get fit!".