The Project Report is published
Introduction
Mapping of experience
The first approach to the literature search within Better Food at Work was carried out on the fundamental basis of the knowledge and results from a previous Danish / Swedish cooperation on “Food at Work around the Clock. Work – Time – Meal”. This research is done by researchers and scientist within the field of health, nutrition, sociology and anthropology at Lund University and the Technical University of Denmark, and published in 2009 by Øresund Food Network (“Mat på arbetet dygnet runt? Mat – Tid – Arbete”). In accordance to the snow ball sampling technique the NordBalt researchers contacted some of the chapter authors, with references to additional relevant literature and researchers. One of the search criteria was to mainly include Nordic and Baltic countries and research, in either Scandinavian languages or in English. The literature search has been collected in a database covering the found literature on food and health promoting initiatives at worksites, in the Nordic and Baltic countries. A search on other initiatives is included because of multifactorial intervention practices that include not solely food based interventions; some of the interventions only include food as a secondary or sub-issue.The project initially included a mapping of important stakeholders and literature from the Nordic and Baltic countries. A literature search was performed using a snow ball sampling technique. This technique enabled us to get in contact with important stakeholders and experts within the field of health promoting initiatives at the workplace, and at the same time identify important literature. The research was mainly focused on the Nordic countries, but included significant contributions from other countries as well.
The literature search outcome is structured in the RefWork's software,interested parties can acces the recorded literatur in the shared database or contact the research group for Food, People & Design at Aalborg University to gain insight. Almost all references are linked to full text PDF files. It is also possible to download the full version of project report and conference proceedings.
Conference
The purpose of the Better Food at Work conference was to share experiences and to get a joined understanding of the future perspectives and challenges related to health at worksites, when implementing health promotion initiatives focusing specifically on eating. The conference aimed at performing a synthesis of experiences across the Nordic and Baltic countries in order to be able to perform a literature analysis; identify evidence based studies; identify best practices; and communicate to authorities, researchers and practitioners.Bringing the conference participants together gave rise to new and interesting perspectives on the challenges of an increased number of individuals leading an unhealthy lifestyle – individuals being at worksites, in their private spheres, and in public foodscapes. It also became clear from the presentations and the debates during the conference that the Nordic and Baltic countries have different histories and traditions regarding food at worksites and research in this area.
Among the most outstanding issues from the presentations it can be mentioned, that there is evidence proving how the workplace as an arena for health promotion can have positive health impact. Effects on lifestyle are documented, in practice i.e. through healthy eating interventions among the employees. Furthermore, it seems that the traditional method with approaching the individual to work with lifestyle changes no longer is as applicable, and that there is a greater potential for making changes by focusing on socio-constructive approaches to large scale numbers of people. Related to this, the social relations and physical contexts should be taken into account in addition to nutrition and eating.
The conference worked constructively with worksites that traditionally have been difficult to implement health promotion initiatives at, due to job specific conditions. The presentations included inspiring interventions from different kinds of worksites that either had irregular working hours or mobile worksites, such as fishermen at sea; truck drivers; health-care workers, physical versus non-physical work etc. The speakers at the conference demonstrated best cases and possible strategies to promote health in different worksites settings, with both traditional and new innovative approaches, such as canteen coin offer; canteen take-away; fruit and vegetable schemes; and healthy canteen maintenance in general.
The participants discussed that a meal is more than eating, and also include experiences. From these discussions it was stressed that future implementations should try to involve considerations regarding social and physical context and that eating is a behaviour influenced by these factors.
Overall, the conference speakers and participants agreed that the process of turning research into policies and implementing health promotion at worksites in practice is dependent on a determined management and passionate practitioners to sustain the results in the long run. The outcome of the conference was most constructive and inspiring for the participants that were rather excited to discuss the presented thesis’s, issues and challenges in the field of eating at worksites. And in general it became clear to the audience that a multi factorial way is important in order to promote healthy eating habits at worksites.
The speakers at the conference approached future research areas and examples of these are to gain knowledge on how changes occur by doing research on the mechanisms and processes within policies, environment and individuals. It seemed unanswered as well how the work-environment shapes the employees diet. Also development of strategies to improve social contexts for making changes seemed to be important, and should of course be studied theoretically as well as in practice. Finally, barriers and facilitators for dissemination of best practices should be explored to secure future maintenance and sustainability of the ‘healthy eating at work’ initiatives.
The feedback summary from the conference questionnaire evaluation gave the impression that the conference very much met the participants’ expectations and the majority seemed to have extended their professional network within the field of health and eating at work across the Nordic and Baltic borders.
Regarding which presentations the participants found most interesting or gave new knowledge on future challenges, the evaluation was more varied and dependent on the participant’s interests. There were different opinions on the number of presentations and professional level of the speakers, which once again underlines the broad origin of the participants.
Conclusion
From the conference it was obvious that collaboration across the Nordic and Baltic countries is needed and wanted. The participants expressed interest and motivation in joining forces across Nordic and Baltic borders. The future challenges lies in identifying the specific subjects for collaboration, searching for funding and placing responsibility for agreed projects.Recently an analysis has been made on the existing knowledge on Food at Worksites in Denmark and Sweden “Mat på arbetet – dygnet runt?” This analysis is a result from cooperation between Danish and Swedish researchers at University level. Could a similar analysis be performed at a more comprehensive level across all Nordic and Baltic countries? In that case it would be important to identify specific competencies and look into the existing knowledge, experiences and best practices.
It is presumed that NordForsk will announce a call for Researcher’s Network with deadline April 2010. The previous NordForsk program allocated approximately 900.000 NOK for a three year period. It is required that there are participants from at least three Nordic countries, or alternatively two Nordic and one Baltic country. It is an obvious opportunity for the Nordic and Baltic competencies to join forces through a NordForsk Researcher’s Network on “Better Food at Work”.