As part of its October Transport Month Campaign, the Eastern Cape Department of Transport held its wellness day on 19 October 2011 at Braelyn Hall, Amalinda in East London.
Organised by the department’s wellness unit,wellness day is an annual event which provides a caring environment where employees living with life limiting experiences that impact adversely on their job performance can interact with other experiences, similar challenges and gain support from a dedicated team of wellness practitioners and volunteers.
It focuses on quality of life by attending to the physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of employees, nurtures an individual as a totality, provides a change of environment from the office set-up, provides the opportunity to explore complementary therapies to assist the employees to cope in the workplace e.g. massage, music and counselling and offers a continuing lifetime support.
Delivering purpose of the Wellness Manager: Sindiswa Magwebu said, the integrated Employee Wellness programme has a vision of providing programmes that can develop and maintain healthy, dedicated, responsive and productive employees within the public service who can add value to the department.
She added that the unit has got a mission which is to build and maintain a healthy workforce for increased productivity and excellent service delivery and that individual participation in the wellness day promotes sharing and provides opportunity to engage in activities that bring meaning and value to daily living, as well as individual wellness i.e. checking of:
- BMI
- Cholesterol
- Pressure
- Healthy lifestyle
- Cancer
- TB
- Eye’s
Present on the day was Virgin Active who conducted a 30 minute workout and there were also presentations on:
- GEMS
- Old Mutual
- Occupational Health and Safety –Mrs Mnyande (Grey Hospital)
- HIV and AIDS (AFA)
According to the South African Constitution, Act 108 of 1996 and Bill of Rights, “Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to health and well –being and the right to health care services including reproductive health care”.
The department would also like to acknowledge the contributions made by Liberty Life and MTN who both sponsored water bottles with the latter also providing lanyards.
