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Funded by the Alberta Sport, Recreation, Parks & Wildlife Foundation and Alberta Community Development, the Alberta Centre for Active Living is an advocate of physical activity for all Albertans and a primary source of research and education on physical activity for practitioners, organizations, and decision-makers. The Centre's mandate is to improve the health and quality of life of Albertans through physical activity. The Alberta Centre for Active Living web site offers workplace wellness resources within the Setting > Workplace menu option. Resources include listings and links to several programs, reports, web sites, and quick facts about active living. One such report, highlighted in the Programs and Resources section, is described below.

An Environmental Scan of Workplace Wellness Programs in Alberta
http://www.centre4activeliving.ca/publications/researchandreports/ 2004EnviroScan/EnvironmentalScan.pdf

This environmental scan gives a snapshot of Alberta workplace wellness programs, including those offered by educational institutions, and describes some positive indicators including:

Many organizations report employee involvement in planning and implementing wellness initiatives (83.3%).
A relatively high percentage of organizations assessed employee needs (70%).
Respondents noted many benefits from workplace wellness programs. These include
- increased awareness of healthy living and a greater likelihood that people would make positive changes to become healthy;
- higher staff morale, an increased sense of belonging, and a general sense of satisfaction;
- increased ability to attract new staff and increased staff retention;
- decreased absenteeism; and
- positive relationships established between management and employees as a result of the initiatives.

Note: A synopsis of the report can be found at http://www.centre4activeliving.ca/publications/research_update/ 2004/ActiveLivingSeptember.htm.

Although written for beginning teachers in New Brunswick, this resource provides helpful information for teachers about: achieving balance; recognizing the symptoms of stress; and managing stress. Frequently asked questions and answers about stress are also provided. Print resources are recommended for further reading including: Time Management for Teachers: Practical Techniques and Skills that Give You More Time to Teach, Collings, Nyack (Parker Publishing, 1987); and The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, Palmer (Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998) among others.

The Canadian Health Network (CHN) is a national, bilingual health promotion program with the goal to help Canadians find information on how to stay healthy and prevent disease. The CHN does this through a collaboration involving federal, provincial and territorial governments, hospitals, libraries, universities, non-government and community-based organizations. The mission of the CHN is to promote healthy choices by communicating trustworthy information on health promotion, and disease and injury prevention. This site provides information for various groups within several topic areas including workplace health. Specific resources for disease prevention are also provided.

A keyword search of the site using "workplace wellness" yielded several resources that may be of interest to those considering developing a workplace wellness program. For example:

The Canadian Healthy Workplace Criteria were developed by the National Quality Institute in partnership with Health Canada and in association with professionals from the health and safety sector. Research and knowledge of the success factors which contribute to employee well being in the workplace as well as the practical experience and outcomes of successful organizations served as the foundation for the design of the criteria. An e-version is available online at a cost of $20 Cdn.

This page provides an alphabetical listing of research article abstracts devoted to the topic of employee and staff wellness. It is clear from the research highlighted on this page that school-based teacher wellness programs have the potential to realize many positive outcomes including, but not limited to: improved health behavior, habits and health status; reduced health care costs; lower employee absenteeism and higher productivity and morale; improved lifestyle behavior; and higher rates of job satisfaction and perceived school quality.

Canada's Healthy Workplace Week began in 2001 to help increase awareness of how important healthy workplaces are to both the short and long term success of organizations. The goals of Canada's Healthy Workplace Week are to:

Take 1 Step: Wellness at Work (Peel District School Board, Mississauga, Ontario)
http://www.takeonestep.org/

Teacher Wellness: An Interpretive Inquiry, Lara Lauzon
(To access this study, contact Lara Lauzon, 721-8378, llauzon@uvic.ca)

Lauzon's study builds upon literature on teacher stress and investigates what makes teachers well. The objectives of the study were:

The inquiry involved in-depth teacher interviews, a focus group, and questionnaires. Six teacher wellness themes emerged: holistic, finding balance, sense of self, self-responsibility, job satisfaction, and connection and support. Two key findings were that teachers, Superintendents and Local Presidents of Teachers' Unions and Associations believed that Teacher Wellness was an important issue, however at present there is no designated leader in the British Columbia public school system taking on a leadership role in this regard.

The Business Case for Active Living at Work web site is one component of the workplace wellness strategies of the Public Health Agency of Canada. This web site:

The Frazzled Principal's Wellness Plan: Reclaiming Time, Managing Stress, and Creating a Healthy Lifestyle, J. Allen Queen, Patsy S. Queen (Corwin Press, 2004)

This wellness guide for principals, school leaders, supervisors, and administrators provides stress management research, tools, techniques, skills, and tips to help administrators understand their responses to stress, predict their vulnerable moments, and reclaim their time. This resource addresses the stresses of managing workplace environments, juggling time and competing priorities, learning to delegate, balancing personal and professional agendas, and creating win-win situations. Special features include:

Written by an educator and a nurse, this book outlines a five-step program to a healthier lifestyle and covers the following strategies:

Understanding and Preventing Teacher Burnout: A Sourcebook of International Research and Practice, Vandenberghe and Heberman Editors (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

This book provides various research perspectives on the nature, conditions and consequences of burnout in the teaching profession, and includes descriptions of the research agendas as well as the action agendas designed to combat burnout in the workplace.

The Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation provides several bibliographies to their members including this publicly-available bibliography of resources related to personal and workplace wellness. Transforming Stress : The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue, and Tension, Doc Lew, Rozman, New Harbinger Publications, 2005 and 50 Ways to Prevent and Manage Stress, Rosenthal, Contemporary Books, 2002 are two of the books listed in this bibliography.