Sleep-deprived, junk food-fueled BPO workers urged to be mindful of personal health

Mila* has spent four of over five years of her career in the business process Outsourcing industry working the night shift, where coffee and cigarettes are her friends during the grueling graveyard hours that she must function after sleeping unsatisfactorily in the afternoons.

Of course, the 25-year-old knows the risks — the coughs a smoker is prone to and the bouts of urinary tract infection among them, but in her case, long-term health takes a backseat to the urgent demand for productivity.

As of 2016, the BPO sector was expected to earn as much as $38.9 billion by 2022. Around 1.15 million sector workers were recorded during the same period, thousands short of the 1.3-million goal.

“When you're stressed at work, you won’t think of what's good and what's bad for your body. You'll just rely on what you think your body needs at the spur of the moment,” she told GMA News Online. 

“I'm not generalizing, pero ‘yung mga nasa BPO, they'll cling to whatever keeps them awake, to whatever keeps them away from all the stress,” she added. 

Her most common reason for a sick leave? Sleep deprivation.

The perils linked to the graveyard shift many Filipinos have been led into amid the uptrend in the BPO industry call for a more proactive approach towards health care among sleep-deprived, junk food-fueled workers, said a former Health chief on Tuesday.

Former Health secretary Paulyn Ubial said that while studies have yet to expressly identify the risks peculiar to BPO workers, it is commonly known that not getting enough sleep typically leads to a weaker immune system.

There are other ailments too: the sore throats, the splitting headaches, the colds, the hearing problems, all of which are attributable half of the way to unreasonable clients, 30 percent to a lack of rest, and 10 to 20 percent to his manager or work quotas, said 22-year-old RJ*, a BPO worker.

One gets used to the work dynamics eventually, however. People learn to adapt—they smoke, exercise, take vitamins, put “detoxifying” citrus-loaded fruits in their drinks. RJ’s strategy is to sleep when he has the chance, he told GMA News Online.

Mila does the same — she goes home as soon as the shift ends, and gets some rest before performing her nightly routine all over again. She has recently tried smoking less and switching to vaping — which poses risks of its own — in a bid to distance herself from nicotine.

Mila and RJ are among the target population of a collaboration between the Department of Health and the social arm of an international health brand which aims to remind BPO workers to pay more attention to their health.

The team behind the campaign commits to turning over the data they will generate from the campaign to the DOH, said Karlo Patron, project leader. The one-year partnership signed on October 3, 2017 — one week before Ubial was rejected by the Commission on Appointments — was Patron’s brainchild.

The “Voice Your Care” campaign aims to promote health and wellness through information dissemination and health caravans as a complement to existing health programs in BPO firms, he said.

“That’s toward improving the health literacy — it’s not just about access to checkups or health services, but it’s for the individual to actually improve his knowledge on how to stay healthy,” Ubial told reporters at the project's launch.

“It’s a push type of thing, you’re pushing the information to them, not waiting for them to ask the questions then we’d give the answers. Here’s the answer. Here’s what you should do,” she added, noting people can occasionally forget the most basic of their body’s needs: sleep and hydration.

Ubial’s advice is vigilance: monitor oneself, practice a healthy lifestyle, catch up on sleep, get checked up regularly to detect any possible health condition early. 

But for Mila, any information campaign “can only do so much,” because affordable health care is still the name of the game.

“Kung accessible sa lahat ‘yung health care, people will not have second thoughts sa pagpapa-check up sa doktor on a regular basis,” she said. Her company covers a part of her health plan, but having dependents had drained her stash in the past.

Ubial, for her part, claimed the DOH is moving towards a “universal health care” program for all Filipinos, enshrined in the Philippine Health Agenda 2016-2022.

The ex-Health chief said government employees are now mandated to undergo annual checkups, and the health department’s vision is to expand this endeavor for all workers by 2022.

An annual checkup could work in only some cases, said Mila, because checkups are limited in scope. Anything more, one is referred to a doctor, making her circle back to the need she raised: affordable health care.

Despite “productivity [being] measured in the number of calls” a worker can take, Patron, the project leader, emphasized the need for rest.

“What we want to be able say is you never trade off your health. It’s okay to miss a little bit of this and that because it’s your health we’re talking about,” said Patron.

“If the insight is you’re doing this work so you can provide for your families, because it’s helping you, then you want to be able to do that sustainably,” he added. — LA, GMA News