News & Updates

Food Standards Scotland achieves gold Healthy Working Lives award

Susan Atkinson, Office Manager
Susan Atkinson, Office Manager

From mental health and wellbeing to physical health, exercise and diet, Healthy Working Lives is something we are very passionate about at Food Standards Scotland, so we were delighted with our recent Gold level certification, awarded through Public Health Scotland.

There is an extensive criteria to meet in order to get a Gold award, including a strategic plan setting out how the standard will be maintained, which is reviewed on an annual basis. This recognition is a real credit to our colleagues on the Healthy Working Lives team and their hard work.

We caught up with two colleagues who have been dedicated to our Healthy Working Lives team since it began; Office Manager, Susan Atkinson and, Incidents Resilience Manager, Christina Anthony, to find out more about the scheme and what it means to them.

Susan said:

“Colleagues at Food Standards Scotland have been enthusiastic and supportive of Healthy Working Lives.

“We really didn’t want it to be a tick box exercise, we wanted it to be something that our colleagues actually benefitted from - for people to get involved in, which they have.

“It was brilliant when we achieved the Bronze and Silver awards, both of which have to be assessed and evidence provided to show standards have been maintained.  Getting gold was fantastic, it recognises the work that the team puts into Healthy Working Lives and our ongoing commitment for a healthy workplace.”

Christina Anthony, Incidents Resilience Manager
Christina Anthony, Incidents Resilience Manager

Christina said:

“It’s been really exciting launching everything from scratch and watching it grow and progress. It really is a great employee benefit.

“I’ve always been passionate about wellbeing in the workplace - employees find it so valuable to know their employer cares about how they are doing.

“Being a part of Healthy Working Lives has encouraged me to up my exercise. We’ve done all sorts of workplace challenges, from steps to swimming. It’s so fun coming up with activities that can help everyone within the organisation.

“We also host an annual healthy picnic and sports afternoon in the park, as we weren’t able to do that this year, we held a fun virtual quiz instead!”

Susan added:

“One campaign we did that we are especially proud of is our blood pressure campaign. We gave staff access to blood pressure monitors to enable them to check their blood pressure as well as a link to give an understanding of what a healthy reading should be, and what to do if it was too high or too low. This actually made a difference to some of our colleagues who didn’t realise that they had high blood pressure and prompted them to seek medical advice.  It was a great thing to do and who knows we may have saved a life or two!"

At the heart of it, Healthy Working Lives is about helping employees.

Gail Young, Finance Business Partner at Food Standards Scotland tells us how she has benefited from the Healthy Working Lives programme:

“When I was younger I used to do a lot of swimming, but life got in the way. When the Healthy Working Lives team sent out the Swim Loch Ness challenge for us as an organisation to swim 22.5 miles in 30 days I thought “that’s something I could do”.

“I actually completed 24.8 miles myself – I made it a personal challenge. I have continued with my swimming at least three times a week, so thank you to the Healthy Working Lives team for bringing swimming back to me!”