Wellness and Wellbeing Programme

The Dairy Farmer Wellness and Wellbeing Programme 2010-2017

The Dairy Farmer Wellness and Wellbeing Programme will provide a multiagency approach in assisting members of the dairy workforce to improve their health and wellbeing so that they can meet the future dairy industry needs and requirements.

Expected outcomes of this project

Outcomes	Benefit
Engagements of at least 600 Dairy farmers through the health check ‘Health PitStop’ method. A key aim of the ‘Health PitStop’ is to continue the process of achieving an awareness of importance in farmer behaviour and attitudes whereby they take positive action for their physical and social well being.	Dairy farmers will begin to understand the importance of their own wellness and wellbeing and how it affects their own workplace productivity. Also, there will be identification of ‘at risk’ dairy farmers who will be presented with information to enable them to take action to address their own health needs.
Raising awareness of the health and dairy sectors to provide resource and support to improve wellness and wellbeing of dairy farmers by 31 May 2012.	Assured third party health and dairy stakeholder advice, resource and support in the delivery of wellness and well-being activities and interventions for the dairy workforce which in turn will support the attraction and retention of dairy workers and improve workforce productivity.
Research: Health Indicators of Dairy Farmers Analysis and presentation of the prevalence of illness and injury in the dairy workforce with a database of the dairy workforce that can be updated using new census material and health databases.	This will be used as a relativity measure to aid and inform strategies/programme work streams for the dairy farmer wellness and well being programmes now and in the future.
Research: Outcomes of a fatigue and work related ‘systems change’ work stream will be presented where participants identify systems contradictions and develop a shared understanding of why these contradictions are present, what their impact is, and how a future system might be modelled if the contradictions could be resolved or removed thereby increasing dairy farmers resilience to fatigue ‘on farm’.	Dairy farmers will search for points of leverage in dairying activities that could lead to significant systemic changes in the work practices, behaviours and culture of dairy farming, and result in significantly improved and sustainable health and wellbeing outcomes for dairy farmers and the farm workforce.
Research: Social Wellbeing (Stress) analysis and presentation of social wellness of people on farms that contains incidences, causes and management of distress, through Health PitStops (targeting dairy farmers), augmented by a national telephone survey of dairy farmers; 2) assessing responses to the referrals for stress management support; to create further resilience of dairy farmers to stress in the workplace.	Dairy farmers will benefit from the development of future systems change activities and interventions that will manage and mitigate stress related problems and create further resilience of dairy farmers to stress in the workplace.