The Centre of Health and Wellbeing (CHWB) is a social enterprise company, offering health and wellbeing outreach services to the business community. CHWB can offer services by attending corporate events, conferences or away days. Alternatively, we are able to prepare and run bespoke programmes of health and wellbeing activities based around your corporate image.
Through our services we:
- Provide education and information.
- Promote the benefits of a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
We measure blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels in addition to conducting healthy-living assessment questionnaires. We work with people, in a non–judgmental manner, to help them understand their own health issues and to recognise the symptoms of diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease (such as hypertension) and other long-term conditions.
Link Housing, very generously, provides us with access to office space at no charge. It’s from this base that our team of talented and committed volunteers operates and focuses on bringing in business.
During our first 18 months of operation we delivered over 30 “healthy-living” events. These include “re-investment events”, where we use the surplus from our business activities to re-invest into the health and wellbeing of organisations, groups and communities who would particularly benefit from our services. We like to call this our “Robin Hood” concept.
For a full list of those we have worked with please contact us on info@chwb.org.uk.
Achievements and Performance
Our health checks have already proved to be very successful. To date, we have identified nearly 250 people with high blood pressure, high blood sugar or high cholesterol levels, from readings taken at our events. It is important to note that these individuals were unlikely to have been aware of these “health warnings” which could ultimately have resulted in diabetes, heart attack or stroke. This represents a potential saving of many millions of pounds to the economy.
Fundraising Events
We held our first fundraising event, “The Laughter Show”, in November 2009 at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh. Although primarily intended to raise funds to support our social re-investment strategy, we also planned to conduct some basic research on laughter therapy and its effects on depression. Thanks to sponsorship from the Big Lottery and the Wise Group, we made a DVD that was used as part of the laughter therapy programme into hard-to-reach communities and to run workshops for people with depression.
Future Plans
Over the coming year we intend to identify and work in partnership with organisations that are working towards the achievement of a “Healthy Working Lives” award, through provision of health and wellbeing checks. We can assist organisations to achieve these awards through our bespoke services.
We also aim to deliver our services at conferences and events to enable us to organise more social re-investment events that will directly benefit the health and wellbeing of the local community.
Finally, we will also be raising the profile of social enterprise in the health sector.
