One Third of the Dutch Workforce is Struggling with Health

One third of the Dutch working population has a chronic condition, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity. According to research, a modified lifestyle with healthier food and more exercise could help. 'There are already several programmes for which more and more scientific evidence is available that they work. We want to adapt these to people's work, because that's where we spend most of our day,' says Noortje Wiezer, principal consultant Healthy Living at TNO.

Therefore, TNO, together with a large group of experts, is calling for adapted lifestyle programmes to be made available for work. Changing your lifestyle is a tough challenge, especially at work. For example when an employee is doing heavy lifting, while also following a physiotherapy programme. TNO and a group of experts are therefore focusing on the "lifestyle medicine @ work" programme, which is part of the Lifestyle4Health platform. Their goal is to reduce the impact of lifestyle-related diseases by 50%, through a paradigm shift from tradition sick-care to health-cure where people are able to take control of their own health (and disease) in their own environment. 'This requires the help of occupational health and safety services, "normal" care, company doctors, insurers and employers,' according to Wiezer.

Read the full article here on the AD website (only available in Dutch).

Lifestyle4Health is a Public-Private Partnership. Lifestyle4Health develops, substantiates and implements (science based) personalised lifestyle interventions for treatment of lifestyle-related diseases. This will reduce the disease burden for patients and may even result in disease remission. Also, this will have considerable economic impact drive a system change where people can take control of their own health in their own environment.

Source: AD

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