HW425 Unit 10 Program Proposal Example

One Page for Three Readers: A Unit 10 Program Proposal for a Grocery Chain's Year-Long Diabetes Prevention Program

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HW425: Health and Wellness Programming - Design and Administration

Unit 10 Program Proposal

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Tallgrass Market, its people and every figure are composite; the prevention research, evaluation framework and workplace wellness studies cited are real.

The Ask

Approve a year-long diabetes prevention program for 90 Tallgrass Market employees at high risk, beginning in February, at a full cost of $69,832, of which $11,550 is cash, with sessions on paid time.

For the owners: the program offers employees at high risk of type 2 diabetes a proven lifestyle change course, in English and Spanish, at their own stores. In the trial on which it is based, intensive lifestyle change cut diabetes incidence by 58 percent over about three years (Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group, 2002).

For the finance chief: $11,550 is new spending. The remaining $58,282 is the value of staff time and room use the chain already pays for, shown so that nothing about the price is hidden from the owners. The program does not promise savings in year one.

For the head of human resources: the program runs in the hour when shifts overlap, under a protected payroll code, led by the chain's own dietitian and two trained pharmacy technicians, and it avoids the November and December freeze entirely.

The Need

A survey of Tallgrass employees found that 41 percent of the 402 who responded scored at high risk for prediabetes on the CDC risk test, rising to 68 percent among those 55 and older, while only 9 percent had ever been told by a clinician that they had prediabetes (Appendix A). That gap, high risk and almost no awareness, is the reason for the program. The overnight crews, who mostly speak Spanish at home, were barely reached by the survey and hear little from the company at all.

The Program

Six cohorts of about fifteen employees will follow the CDC's PreventT2 curriculum, free in English and Spanish, over twenty-two one-hour sessions: sixteen weekly, then six monthly (Appendix B). Day and evening cohorts meet at 2:15 p.m. at four stores with community rooms. The overnight cohort meets in Spanish half an hour before its crew clocks in, a time chosen after a reviewer who stocks shelves overnight pointed out that no one attends a class after a long shift. Coaches give every participant a one-page risk summary to take to a clinician.

Objectives

Five objectives define success (Appendix C):

1. Reach: a full roster of 90 by the end of month four, with overnight crews well represented.

2. Attendance: about two thirds of enrollees present for at least nine early sessions.

3. Activity: half of active participants at 150 minutes a week by month six.

4. Weight: average loss of 5 percent at month twelve among everyone who began.

5. Clinical connection: 60 percent report discussing their risk with a clinician.

Budget

Full cost is $69,832 (Appendix D). Staff time makes up $55,754, and half of the total, $34,956, is participants' paid session time. Cash spending of $11,550 covers coach training, scales, bilingual workbooks, recruitment materials, session snacks and evaluation. Room use, valued at $2,528, is provided by the stores. Full cost per enrollee is about $776; cash cost per enrollee is about $128.

Timeline

Coach training, payroll setup and manager briefings finish before November 1. Recruitment runs in January, and cohorts launch in early February (Appendix E). Weekly sessions continue through July, monthly sessions through the following January, and a final report follows in March.

Who Will Run It

The program is run entirely by Tallgrass staff. The HR benefits specialist coordinates, with the HR analyst as backup. The retail dietitian leads two cohorts and supervises coaching. Two pharmacy technicians, one bilingual, lead the other four cohorts after completing lifestyle coach training. Store managers protect session time through a payroll code that cannot be overridden on the floor. An outside contractor handles evaluation data so that no one in the company sees individual results.

Recruitment

Day and evening staff will be reached through the newsletter, the employee app and store meetings. Overnight crews will be reached through their crew leads at the start-of-shift huddle, peer ambassadors and bilingual flyers at the time clock, with a message that leads with paid time and privacy (Appendix F).

Evaluation

Success, partial success and failure are defined for each objective before the program starts (Appendix G). The weight result counts every enrollee, with dropouts counted as no change. Individual data are held under code numbers, and managers see only aggregate results.

The proposal asks the owners to judge the program by whether it reaches employees at risk and helps them change, and it sets out, before the first session, the measures and the results that would count against it.

What This Will Not Do

The first year will not reduce health plan costs in a way that can be measured. A randomized trial of one large employer's wellness program found no measurable drop in medical claims after a year and a half (Song & Baicker, 2019), and claims are not the reason to run this program. It will not diagnose or treat anyone; that remains with employees' own clinicians. It will not extend health coverage to part-time employees, though they may enroll. And it will not replace the medical care any participant receives; its role is to help employees act on a risk most of them did not know they had.

Risks and Responses

1. Overnight recruitment falls short: a second round of huddle talks in week four.

2. Coach training slips past October: launch moves to March, and the owners are told immediately.

3. Pharmacy backfill unavailable: sessions led by the dietitian are moved to cover affected cohorts.

Questions the Readers May Ask

Why not start sooner? Because a fall launch would collide with the holiday freeze, interrupting the early weeks when attendance matters most. Why not use an outside provider? Because the in-house coaches know the stores and the employees, can offer a Spanish-language cohort and will remain available for future cohorts. Why paid time? Because the survey showed most employees would attend only on paid time, and attendance is what drives results.

Why Now

The prevention evidence is strong, the national program's evaluation shows that attendance drives results (Ely et al., 2017), and the program's design answers the attendance barriers Tallgrass employees named. A program built this way, measured honestly, gives the owners a real answer to their original request.

Appendices

A. Needs assessment. B. Program design. C. Objectives. D. Budget and resource plan. E. Implementation timeline. F. Recruitment plan. G. Evaluation plan.

References

Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. (2002). Reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes with lifestyle intervention or metformin. New England Journal of Medicine, 346(6), 393-403. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa012512

Ely, E. K., Gruss, S. M., Luman, E. T., Gregg, E. W., Ali, M. K., Nhim, K., Rolka, D. B., & Albright, A. L. (2017). A national effort to prevent type 2 diabetes: Participant-level evaluation of CDC's National Diabetes Prevention Program. Diabetes Care, 40(10), 1331-1341. https://doi.org/10.2337/dc16-2099

Song, Z., & Baicker, K. (2019). Effect of a workplace wellness program on employee health and economic outcomes: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 321(15), 1491-1501. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.3307