Abstract
Chronic diseases affect the overall health of an employee in the workplace, increase employer health-related expenses, decrease productivity days, and contribute to work absences. For employees, wellness programs promote health and prevent disease. The purpose of this project was to examine possible barriers for lack of employee preventative healthcare visits and implement interventions to improve the care gap at a local business. An anonymous paper survey was issued to 1,233 employees at Chief Industries, Inc. A majority of the survey participants were male and between 18 to 75 years of age. The top suggested barrier for not attending a wellness visit was I am healthy and my health fair results were normal (47%). These findings influenced interventions to the wellness program to increase annual employee preventative healthcare visits to 40% in 2018. The lack of perceived need for health care and negative perception of chronic disease states can be a deterrent for preventative health care. Effective wellness programs should incorporate interventions that target employee health beliefs.