DOH bats for ‘SEX’ in call centers

Call center workers in Metro Manila should have more “SEX.”

But it’s SEX that stands for “stress-free, eating right and exercise,” according to government officials who apparently know a catchy acronym when they see one.

The Department of Health (DOH) and the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) on Friday introduced a joint project targeting call center agents who are prone to unhealthy habits like smoking, excessive drinking and missing sleep.

Formally known as “iCare Healthy Lifestyle Office Caravan,” the project will deploy DOH teams to at least 30 call center companies in the metropolis to conduct risk assessments, health forums and workshops that will reacquaint the workers with a healthy lifestyle for at least three months.

“We will conduct a 30-minute health talk about the problems of call center agents, which is stress, lack of physical activity, unhealthy diet and smoking and drinking. We will touch on all of these,” said Dr. Ethelyn Nieto, a former health undersecretary and now chair of the project’s technical working group.

Nieto said many call center agents are exposed to high levels of stress, a risk factor for hypertension. “We will teach them how to relieve stress as well as how to eat right and exercise.”

Check after three months

“We would want to change their lifestyle, but we’ll just teach them how to do it. It’s not about dictating them. It’s up to them if they think they should live a healthy lifestyle,” she added.

To ensure the project’s sustainability, the teams will return to these companies every three months.

Nieto noted that the call center industry now employing 680,000 workers nationwide is one of the largest groups of wage earners in the country. The project will initially cover this year about 200,000 call center agents in Metro Manila, where 70 percent of the companies are based.

“We will expand [later] to Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao,” Nieto said.

Call center agents, the majority of them doing the graveyard shift, are susceptible to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because of their unhealthy lifestyle, said Assistant Health Secretary Eric Tayag.

‘Risky behavior’

“We will introduce ‘SEX’—stress-free, eat the right food and exercise,” said Tayag.

Tayag’s choice of acronym may draw a knowing smile from the project’s target crowd: Sex—the unsafe kind—indeed counts as an alarming health concern in the industry, as earlier acknowledged by the DOH itself.

In 2010, the agency issued a statement citing a study conducted on 35 business processing outsourcing companies (BPO) in Metro Manila and Cebu showing that call center agents, due to their working environment and peer pressure, “tend to be involved in risky sexual behaviors” with “regular nonromantic partner(s).”

Prior the Friday’s launch, a more recent study on the bioelectrical impedance or body composition of some 1,500 call center agents found 60 percent of the subjects having a metabolic age higher than their chronological age.

The project is in partnership with DOLE’s Occupational Health and Safety Center, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines and the Call Center Association of the Philippines, among others. With a report from Inquirer Research