Cancer kills 70% of its victims in low- and middle-income countries, and a new trial will test whether Chinese workplaces can cut that toll by changing how employees eat, drink, smoke, and move. Most workplace cancer-prevention programmes have been designed and tested in wealthy nations like the US and UK. China, with its enormous workforce and rising cancer burden, lacks a scalable model that fits its diverse regions, diets, and economic conditions. This project fills that gap by adapting proven strategies to Chinese settings. The research will develop a comprehensive intervention package—covering tobacco, alcohol, diet, obesity, and physical inactivity—and test it in 15 workplaces across three economically underdeveloped provinces. Roughly 1,500 employees will participate, with intervention durations of one, two, or two-and-a-half years. A smartphone app will support individual behaviour change, while organisational policies and workplace environments are also redesigned. If successful, the model could be rolled out to millions of Chinese workers and adapted by other low- and middle-income countries facing similar cancer burdens. The long-term goal is to reduce premature deaths from cancer, stroke, and heart attacks, while also improving employee productivity and employer economic returns. The research directly targets United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.4.
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Globally, cancer is the second leading cause of death and approximately 70% of the cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The death numbers are continuing to increase, which puts a tremendous burden on individuals and the healthcare system in LMICs. Workplace is an important channel for cancer prevention and control. Several high-income countries, such as the US and the UK, have established workplace health promotion programmes to address behaviour risk factors of cancer. These programmes have been successfully implemented, resulting in a significant improvement not only in behaviour changes of the employees, but also in the work-related outcomes, including economic returns of the employers. Based on the international experience and local assessment, our research will adapt existing evidence-based strategies and establish a scalable model for cancer prevention that can be widely applied in Chinese workplaces. A comprehensive workplace intervention package, which will address major behaviour risks of cancer for the employees, such as tobacco and alcohol use, unhealthy diet, obesity and lack of physical activity, will be developed, implemented and evaluated through a series of multilevel involvement strategies covering individual programmes, organizational policies and supportive environment and with the support of a tailored smartphone application. In this research, we will test the adaptability of the intervention package across various workplaces in diverse regions with different diets and lifestyles. We will select 15 workplaces with approximately 1500 employees from three cities located in the northern, central and southern provinces of China respectively - mostly in the economically underdeveloped areas. By full engagement of employers and employees in a staggered design with the intervention duration lasting for 1 year, 1.5 years and 2 years respectively, the research aims to achieve the individual behaviour changes in modifiable risk factors of cancer. In the long term, the research outcome will also be demonstrated by the reduction of occurrence of cancer and other major non-communicable diseases, such as stroke and heart attacks of employees, the productivities of the employees and their work performance, as well as the economic benefits of the employers. The comprehensive workplace intervention will bring enormous benefits to millions of Chinese workplace population and furthermore, will have a great potential to be adapted by many other LMICs with a similar situation of heavy cancer burden. The research will provide evidence and solutions to address the common challenges of these countries, particularly to overcome the barriers in intervention implementation. Ultimately, the research outcome will contribute to the attainment of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3.4 by reducing a great deal of premature mortality from cancers. The success of this research will lead to significant global health impact in a world with huge health and economic burden caused by cancer.
Baohua Wang (Co-Investigator)Feng He (Principal Investigator)Graham MacGregor (Co-Investigator)Jing Wu (Co-Investigator)Puhong Zhang (Co-Investigator)Stephen Duffy (Co-Investigator)Yu Liu (Co-Investigator)Yuan Li (Co-Investigator)
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