Fitness, Healthcare & Private Medical Insurance

Source: Technology Digital

Date :12/10/2007 6:34:09 AM

People are your greatest asset, so if they are absent or ill, you lose. A company gym, screening program and good PMI aid recruitment and retention as part of an employee management program.

By John O’Hanlon

This is a subject close to my heart. Eight years ago I accepted a health screening for myself as part of the research for an article on a leading private hospital and healthcare company. Having been fit as a fiddle all my life I took it up simply as an opportunity to see inside one of these hospitals. Sure enough, the results came in at 100 percent apart from one small query.

My PSA (prostate specific antigen) was borderline. I was sent to my doctor for a second test. This confirmed the level – a bit high in the normal range. Normally he’d have left it at that but because I came in on referral he referred me in turn to the hospital urologist. In short it turned out that I did have prostate cancer, early stage but an aggressive type. “If you leave it alone, John, it will do you harm.”

Available treatments are radical prostatectomy (cutting it out) radiotherapy (burning it out) or brachytherapy, a newish procedure that involves implanting radioactive seeds to kill the cancer. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to Dr John Blasko of the Seattle Prostate Institute, the first radiation oncologist in the US to perform transrectal ultrasound and template-guided brachytherapy for prostate cancer, and Dan Ash, who did the job, I was off work for a week, and since then I have been clear. Thanks to Drs Blasko and Ash.

Screening works

I tell this tale because I believe everybody should be able to have what came to me through luck. Prostate cancer affects a high percentage of men at some stage in their lives; women have to contend with cervical, breast or ovarian cancer; both suffer from RSI, muscular-skeletal problems, heart problems, smoking related illnesses and so on. These things shorten their lives, keep them off work and are a heavy cost to the insurance industry, Medicare (if you are eligible) and employers.

But if it’s diagnosed early, it can be cured, managed or alleviated. From the company’s point of view this might mean that you get years of work out of an employee who might have died or had to retire. Any procedure is likely to be less invasive and mean less time off work. Down the line the condition can be monitored. Put crudely, if each employee was a robot preventive maintenance would be in place to make sure you get maximum up-time and a maximum working life out of that machine. Any manufacturing manager, and any accountant, can tell you that costs less than replacement or taking the machine out of service for repair. Treat employees like machines, then – it makes sense.

Private Medical Insurance

But that’s not even the main reason why businesses need to think about managing their employees’ fitness for work. It won’t help to recruit or hold onto staff if you treat them like a machine, however good that looks in the back office. There are two philosophies abroad in the corporate world. One says: ‘We need medical insurance because that is part of our reward package’, so they just look for a good product at a good price. Increasingly though, people are taking a holistic interest in employee welfare because of its effect on recruitment and retention.

This has been the case in the US since World War One…

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