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 Professional Health Fair Coordination |
All of Health Fairs Direct's exhibitors are all independently screened to make sure that they will be a good fit for your company. We hold no allegience to any specific exhibitor and contract with each exhibitor individually to ensure that your company is protected.
Health Fairs Direct's medical exhibitors are confirmed to be in-network with your medical insurance. (The following exhibitors are guaranteed to be in-network: Chiropractic, Dental, Physical Therapy and Podiatry.)
Health Fairs Direct ensures that all blood screenings and flu shots are delivered by groups that are properly licensed by your State Health Department for corporate clinics.
Health Fairs Direct ensures that each exhibitor follows our exclusive Code of Conduct to help ensure the success of your event. Our exclusive code of conduct ensures that all of our exhibitors will be a good fit for your corporation and each and every employee health program that we deliver is an overwhelming success.
Health Fairs Direct has each exhibitor sign an indemnification agreement to help insulate your company from any potential legal problem.
No other health fair company offers this.
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Corporate Health Fairs: Choosing a Professional Planner
Corporate Health Fairs are in high demand. When done correctly, health fairs are fun, they improve employee morale, job satisfaction and productivity. The Return on Investment (ROI) and health insurance savings are just the latest undeniable factors that are bringing Health Fairs to the forefront of corporate strategic initiatives.
Designing and implementing a winning health fair is not too hard to do providing you choose a professional corporate health & wellness event planner to help you. More important than designing a fun event, a professional event planner will take care of all of the required permits, ensure that all of the licensing is in place and protect your company with their own liability and medical malpractice insurance policies.
If you want to make a positive impact with your health fairs you need to include the following 3 major components that make up full service health and wellness events:
- Medical Screenings:
- Body Fat
- Glucose
- Blood Pressure
- Cholesterol
Most corporate employees have a tough time with work-life balance and do not take the time to go to the doctor for regular checkups. These medical screenings will impinge on your at-risk employees and give them the sense that they should do something to improve their health.
This is the most immediate source of creating a need for change within your high risk employees. These medical screenings will give them instant facts about their current level of health that are hard to ignore.
*Just make sure that your provider of choice is:
· Properly licensed and adheres to all of your State’s health department’s rules and regulations. (Request copies of their licensing.)
· Fully insured to protect you from any liability. Make sure the insurance is in the name of the screening provider ONLY and ensure they have current policies for liability as well as medical malpractice. (Request a copy of their insurance certificate.)
Now that your employees have their medical results, you need to incorporate some easy to implement solutions for those at risk employees. This is a very important step because if you do not give your employees immediate outlets to find solutions to their newly discovered health issues, you will leave your at-risk employees with more stress then they had before they came to the event.
- Local Health and Wellness Exhibitors:
While juggling their schedules to make the best of their work-life balance, most corporate employees do not visit the doctor on a regular basis. This is what has contributed to their becoming high risk for health issues in the first place. The average employee is not going to go out and “shop” for a doctor. This is why you need to provide a large assortment of prescreened local health and wellness exhibitors for your employees to interact with and learn from.
A good exhibitor will focus on educating your employees and not on selling their products or services. Once your employees learn about the exhibitor’s products and services and how they can benefit from them, they should be free to initiate their own interest in the exhibitor’s products or servcies.
Exhibitors who are sales focused or pushing for appointments will be a turn-off for your employees. This will cause many employees to not take the time to learn about the benefits of the exhibitor’s services. One bad exhibitor can ruin the educational effect of an entire event. Remove the educational impact from your event and you dramatically reduce the effectiveness of your health and wellness event.
Ensure that your health fair provider has each exhibitor sign a strict Exhibitor Code of Conduct to make sure that they will be a good fit for your event.
Once your at-risk employees interact with and have learned about some new health and wellness services from local exhibitors they will be better prepared to start taking steps toward a stronger healthy lifestyle. It really does not matter which product or service an employee chooses to look into so long as they make some small decision toward better health. For example, if one of your at-risk employees decides to call their own dentist for a much needed cleaning after speaking visiting the local exhibitors, they have just taken a small step toward better health. This small step will be in the right direction toward, and could encourage more, behavioral changes in the future. You will not achieve this without having the local health & wellness exhibitors as part of your event.
The local health and wellness exhibitor portion of your event is a critical component to your event’s overall success. Just pay attention to the following guidelines and your event will be OK.
Make Sure You:
· Use a Professional Health & Wellness Fair Company to prescreen and book your exhibitors for you.
· Sign a contract with your health fair company that outlines exactly what you should expect of their services and the exhibitors they will be booking.
· Insist on an indemnification clause from each exhibitor to limit your personal and your company’s liability.
· Do your Due Diligence to make sure your health fair company is a well respected professional event planner who is properly licensed and insured.
To limit your company’s and your personal liability Make Sure You:
· Do Not Get Fooled into working with a doctor’s office posing as a health fair company.
· Do Not Invite in your own exhibitors as this implies that your company has endorsed them and opens you up for liability lawsuits.
· Do Not Allow out-of-network medical exhibitors into your event.
· Do Not Allow any exhibitor or screening into your event that could be a safety or insurance risk. (For example, one company allowed a new health fair company to provide an Oxygen Bar into their health fair because they thought it would be fun. Oxygen bars are a safety risk for fire/explosion, have dangerous high pressure oxygen containers and require individual prescriptions to be legally dispensed for medical grade [human consumption grade] oxygen.)
- Health & Wellness Promotional Items, Literature and Samples:
Health Fair Giveaways © are health and wellness promotional items that you should give to each employee that attends your health fair. They should be custom labeled with your company’s name, logo and/or wellness slogan to add more value to the items in the eyes of your employees.
Health and wellness promotional items are a very inexpensive incentive that will increase your event attendance and add more excitement to your event.
Some popular promotional items for corporate health fairs are:
· Recyclable Material Bags
· Hand Sanitizers
· Water Bottles
· Pedometers
· Exercise Bands
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· Lip Balm
· Travel Toothbrushes
· Stress Balls
· Bandage Holders
· Foot Files
· Wellness Guides
There are endless Health Fair Giveaways© options so you are sure to find something that will fit the theme of your event and your corporate culture.
Health and Wellness promotional items extend the impact of the event far beyond the event itself. Whenever your employees see or use one of the giveaway items it will remind them of the action(s) that they decided to take while they were at the event. It will become a gentle reminder that they should be taking action toward their better health and wellbeing.
Event Themes
Creating fun event themes are a fun way to increase attendance and employee participation. They can help to reduce the overall stress level in your company and make learning about serious health issues fun and more interesting.
Any sort of health, wellness, relaxation or getaway themes work well for health and wellness events. Some fun themes are:
- Stress Down Days
- Employee Appreciation Days
- Hawaiian Themes
- Beach Themes
- Spring Time Themes
- Strawberry Festivals
- Fall Harvest Festivals
- Marathons
- Bike Rallies
Get creative but keep your overall corporate culture in mind. If you work for a very conservative company a Hawaiian theme might not be the best choice.
Door Prize Games
Creating a door prize game is a great incentive to increase attendance at any workplace wellness program and get your employees to participate in the event. Keep in mind that a health fair is likely to touch on some sensitive issues and your employees may not visit the very exhibitor that they need to see the most if they are sensitive about their coworkers finding about their condition.
A good door prize game will give your employees an incentive to visit each and every booth in order to give each employee a socially acceptable excuse to talk with each exhibitor without feeling self conscious.
Choosing a Professional Event Planner
Your most important step is to choose a professional event planner that specializes in employee health program, flu shot and health fair strategies that will be a good fit for your organization and will have your organization’s needs as their primary focus. Coordinating your corporate health fair yourself is not a safe or economical option that you want to explore as there are just too many potential financial, medical and legal liabilities with running these events yourself.
Even if a professional corporate health and wellness event planner charges for their services it will be one of the best investments your company can make. An independently owned professional corporate health and wellness event planner will:
· Do the majority of the work for you allowing you to focus on your primary responsibilities.
· Prescreen all of your exhibitors based on their high level of industry experience.
· Protect you from liability by distancing you and your company from the specific exhibitors and medical screening companies that attend your event.
· Protect you from financial implications with their liability and medical malpractice insurance.
· Understand the licensing and permitting requirements and handle all of the legwork for you.
· Take the stress out of planning your event.
Finding a professional event planner to run your corporate health fair is not too hard once you know what to look for. It is similar to hiring a good employee: you need to do your research, interview a number of companies and weed out those companies that do not meet your standards. And most importantly, do your due diligence to make sure you are working with a reputable, independently owned corporation and not a small ‘mom & pop’ organization or a doctor-owned company.
Here are a few guidelines for you to consider.
You should only work with:
· Privately owned companies with a favorable Dun & Bradstreet rating. (If they are not significant enough to be listed on Dun & Bradstreet then they will not be a reliable company for you to work with.)
· Established companies with a minimum of 7 years experience.
· Companies that are well respected in the industry and demonstrate a leadership role through industry publications, etc.
Words of Caution:
· Never accept kickbacks such as free cholesterol screenings or free lunch for your employees. (This is a sure sign of a doctor owned company who will be using your event to grow their specific medical practice at the risk of increased medical insurance premiums in the future.)
· Never allow out-of-network medical doctors into your health fair regardless of promises for the exhibitors to “treat your employees as if they are in-network”. It is insurance fraud when out-of-network exhibitors employ this billing practice. Your reference for this is the Long Island Pulmonary Assoc. v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 2/14/2003 N.Y.L.J. 24 (col. 6) (Sup. Court, Nassau Co.2003).
· Do not have blind faith in your sales representative. You should trust but verify ownership, licensing, insurance coverage etc.
Make sure you do your Due Diligence before you hire a Corporate Health Fairs company. This will make the difference between having a positive ROI or a Negative ROI, between being protected or exposed to liability issues and the difference in creating an event that will help to create a culture of health and wellness in your organization or turning your employees off because they have been harassed by unprofessional exhibitors.
For more Health Fair Ideas Call
732-563-9749 x0 or email at
healthfairdesign@healthfairsdirect.com
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Health Fair Direct's corporate offices are located in New Jersey and New York, NY. Most of our health fair, flu shot, employee health program and employee wellness events are in New York City, NJ, CT and other major US cities.
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For your convenience, download the complete PDF file of trends, problems, and solutions as a resource for your Health Fair and Wellness event; Complements of Health Fairs Direct.
