Tyson Foods Pilots New Healthcare Clinics For Meatpacking Workers

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n Foods announced plans today for a new approach to worker healthcare at its meatpacking facilities. The company will launch a pilot of seven new healthcare clinics to be located at a handful of the company’s meatpacking plants.

Opening by the first half of 2021, the clinics will be operated by Marathon Health and will focus on primary and preventative healthcare.

Services will include health screening, lifestyle coaching and health education, which will be offered for free or at a low cost to nearly 38,000 Tyson workers and their families, including dependents over the age of two.

Meatpacking work is one of the most grueling and dangerous occupations in the food industry. According to the Occupational Safety and Workplace Administration, workers are exposed to hazards that include “high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals.”

Yet even though the new clinics will treat non-occupational health issues, Tyson’s chief human resources officer Johanna Söderström says that better access to preventative healthcare will also help boost workplace safety.

“At Tyson we’ve tied health and safety together. It is under the same umbrella,” said Söderström. “If you can focus on the task at hand and what you’re doing, you probably can prevent safety incidents.”

One of the seven new clinics will open in Storm Lake, Iowa. The Storm Lake pork processing plant has had 591 employees test positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began, with one reported death. In total, over 10,000 Tyson employees have contracted the Coronavirus, according to reporting from the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

The new health clinics will operate in tandem with the plant’s existing occupational health and COVID testing services. The company launched a new nationwide COVID testing strategy on July 30, as well as plans to hire a chief medical officer and add almost 200 nurses to the company’s 400-member health services team.

Tyson’s will also open a clinic at its Holcomb, Kansas beef processing plant, a plant that currently employs more than 3,000 people. The remaining pilot clinic locations will be announced in the next few months. 

Company representatives emphasized that these clinics are part of an ongoing “culture of wellness” strategy that was already in the works long before the pandemic.

Explained Söderström, the company saw that many employees weren’t taking advantage of their health care benefits. “A certain population doesn’t use their health care plan at all,” she added. “And we are of course trying to figure out why that is the case.”

Her hope is that the workplace clinics will help more workers get regular medical care rather than waiting until they become ill or injured to head to an emergency room for treatment. 

The clinics will also offer health education and preventative care for conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, conditions that Söderström says impact the Tyson workforce as well as the broader population.

“One of the things that we found is our team members would come to the nursing staff at the facility, but not with an occupational health issue,” explained Tom Brower, Tyson’s senior vice president of health and safety. These employees were raising personal healthcare questions, the company found, so they wanted a way to meet that need.

Marathon Health provides healthcare clinics for around 150 companies in total, including Tyson’s, according to Jerry Ford, the healthcare company’s CEO. Too often healthcare is reactive, said Ford, who praised Tyson’s approach to “engage people earlier and make it part of the overall wellness culture.”