The country’s 1.3 million business -process outsourcing (BPO) workers are at risk of losing their jobs if they leave their health unchecked, experts warned on Tuesday.
At a news briefing, former Health Secretary Paulyn Jean B. Rosell Ubial and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Inc. Voice Your Care Project Lead Karlo Patron said BPO workers are prone to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
Patron said these could make them miss work, be late, make them ineligible to qualify for benefits or even work in the industry.
“If you take a leave, for instance, then you’re no longer eligible for incentives, if you’re late, you’re no longer eligible for those. What we want to be able to say is, you never trade-off your health,” Patron said.
“It’s okay to miss a little bit of this and that because it’s your health we are talking about. If the insight is you are doing this work to provide for your family, then you want to be able to do it sustainably. So, at the onset, get yourself checked,” he added.
J&J and the Department of Health (DOH) has launched Voice Your Care, an advocacy-driven campaign dedicated to promoting health and wellness within the BPO sector of the Philippines.
The program aims to address health concerns of the Philippine BPO Industry through health modules cocreated with the DOH, on-ground activities and workshops with health-care practitioners and information-driven digital content.
Rosell-Ubial said BPO workers are especially susceptible to diseases, since they are exposed to cold surroundings and often lack sleep due to graveyard shifts.
These diseases usually start as simple cough and cold and become full-blown respiratory diseases such as asthma. Many symptoms, Ubial said, unfortunately are “silent” ones but whose repercussions could be fatal.
Rosell-Ubial also said “common knowledge” about diseases, including among physicians, have also changed. One such example was diabetes, wherein Rosell-Ubial said they were taught that only fat females in their 50s get the disease.
This is no longer the case now, since there are men who have diabetes, and there are women who, even are in their in early-20s, get the disease.
“In general terms in the health sector, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. [Keep your focus on] wellness and prevention. Even if you spend on it, its better than finding yourself sick,” Rosell-Ubial said.
J&J Philippines and the DOH inked a one-year partnership, with options to extend up to two more years.
They will be rolling out more activities throughout the year, including health caravans with health-care practitioners, corporate social responsibility initiatives with private companies and strategic partnerships with BPO companies.
Currently, there is no law mandating annual physical checkups for private and public employees. However, Rosell-Ubial said that before she stepped down as health secretary, she was able to get a policy approved to mandate all government to undergo annual physical checkup.
This, Rosell-Ubial said, is now lodged at the Civil Service Commission, and has now become the standard in all national agencies.
But the challenge, Rosell-Ubial said, is that not all hospitals have the capability to conduct annual physical checkups of government employees.
Rosell-Ubial said that, in Davao, the Southern Philippines Medical Center has the capability to conduct annual physical checkups for 1,000 people everyday. This is something that other hospitals, including those in Metro Manila, cannot do.
“Our hospitals in Metro Manila are not prepared for that. They don’t have the setup that we have in Davao that can do that, and I told them you have to prepare your hospital for that because that’s the next big thing,” Ubial said.
“If all the teachers, there are 300,000 of them, all the soldiers, all the police will go for annual checkups, I don’t know if our hospitals have the capacity for that,” she added.
The Voice Your Care advocacy campaign hopes to create a behavioral change that would empower every BPO agent to actively seek treatment for their ailments and choose a healthier lifestyle.
In its over 60 years in the country, J&J Philippines has helped Filipinos address the most common ailments and diseases with their high-quality medicine and medical technology in town clinics and hospital operating rooms.