The Annual Health Assessment (AHA): does it contribute to operational readiness?
Aim: To critically analyse the process of AHA’s in the ADF, benchmark these activities against evidence based guidelines and identify potential opportunities for improvement.
Methods: We reviewed 50 consecutive AHA’s performed routinely in the LMA extracting results for key lifestyle
and psychological data. We then identified how these factors were clinically reviewed by the health service. Finally, we conducted a search of medical literature to identify best practice in the delivery of workplace health promotion.
Results: The AHA is a reliable tool for identifying cigarette smoking, overweight/obesity and elevated blood pressure. It is less reliable in detecting harmful alcohol intake and psychological distress. Follow up these lifestyle risks is unstructured and piecemeal. The literature review revealed a number of best practice features of workplace health promotion programs including personalised self-management programs, targeting of specific at risk groups, disease
registers and recall systems, strong community and organisational commitment, program sustainability, quality initiatives, including information management and professional development and best practice guidelines.
Discussion: The AHA is a compulsory component of AIRN compliance. It offers a potentially powerful vehicle for health promotion activities to reach the entire ADF population. Current processes identify at risk individuals for many lifestyle factors, their followup however, is not maximised. A more targeted and systematic approach, including the development of supportive IT systems could help to greatly improve the impact of such activities and through them, contribute to improving operational readiness.
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