We are delighted to announce that the Care Inspectorate has followed its Healthy Working Lives Silver Award in 2016 by achieving the Gold award this year, the highest accolade available.

The Care Inspectorate achieved the highly regarded honour after a rigorous assessment process and was able to demonstrate ongoing commitment to improving the health, safety and wellbeing of all its employees.

It is the aim of Healthy Working Lives (HWL) to make the improvement to health and wellbeing in the workplace an integral part of Scottish corporate culture and this award confirms the Care Inspectorate has in place supportive workplace policies and procedures that encourage positive health and wellbeing and the development of a good work life balance. Employee health and wellbeing underpins the organisational strategy, culture and ethos.

A HWL strategy and action plan was developed for the next three years that provides a strong framework in guiding the organisation in its future planning and daily operational delivery, together with regular health and wellbeing activities and information campaigns.  There are too many to list each one individually but they include personal resilience training, CPR training, mental health awareness sessions, training for managers on how to manage mental health in the workplace, work positive stress survey and blood donation sessions.

We also focus on improving physical activity by running yearly staff pedometer challenges and providing sit-stand desks to encourage staff to spend less time in a sedentary position. In addition we have also sourced corporate gym memberships across the majority of local authority and private gyms in Scotland, providing fitness classes within the workplace and introducing a host of employee benefits for example,  Employee Assistance Programme, Childcare Vouchers, Cycle to Work scheme, My Lifestyle (discounts and benefits), Discovery Credit Union and a range of family friendly policies.

Each of our offices actively promote and encourage healthy working lives by ensuring that all national information campaigns or activities are clearly displayed and promoted within their office space.  Many individual offices have also created their own health and wellbeing activities from walking groups, healthy eating recipes and providing fresh fruit and veg for staff to buy on site.

Karen Reid, our Chief Executive and Chair of the HWL Group says : “We are committed to continually invest in our employees’ welfare and empower everyone to even greater achievements. We are truly thrilled that we have now achieved our Gold Award and this is testament to the hard work of all staff who have always supported and gone the extra mile on all our HWL initiatives – this is a credit to you all”.