18 June 2024
In April and May, 2220 Novartis employees across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa region joined forces for the second annual Unblocked APMA Challenge. This friendly competition using the social fitness app, GoJoe, injected fun into healthy life choices by enabling people to track and share their physical activities and compete against each other in teams.
During this time, the 339 teams engaged in a total of over 47,000 activities, burning close to 10 million calories! The teams took staying healthy to the next level – including taking part in a half-marathon in Egypt, through holding heart pumping bootcamps in UAE, to ‘Jakarta Car-Free Day’ activities in Indonesia. Singapore also held a Fiesta which included kick boxing, K-pop dance classes and a Wheel of Fortune heart health trivia. The engagement was fun filled and .
Ruth Kuguru, Executive Director of Communications and Patient Advocacy, APMA, Novartis said, “I’m excited to run the Unblocked Challenge for heart health in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa region for a second year. Novartis is proud of our ongoing commitment to ‘unblock’ barriers to heart health, not only with our employees but in partnership with key stakeholders including patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare systems. Partnership efforts to co-create actions and solutions to improve cardiovascular health in our communities are our key priority and will continue through the Unblocked Movement and beyond.”
According to the Asia Pacific Cardiovascular Disease Alliance, cardiovascular disease accounts for 35% of all deaths in Asia alone. The reality is many of these deaths are actually preventable. To read more about it, please click here (link to Unblocked Movement instead),