KUCHING: The Ministry of Health’s (MoH) recent recommendation that employers provide an additional day off for workers to undergo health screening is a gesture of goodwill from the government to highlight the importance of health to both employers and their workers.
In stating this, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak’s (UNIMAS) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences public health expert Associate Professor Dr Helmy Hazmi stressed that healthy workers contribute to the growth of the country.
“The leave to allow workers to undergo health screening might benefit workers who are living out of town or rural areas, where the health facilities and medical laboratories might not be as extensive as those in the city.
“Hence, workers would surely benefit from the time off to travel to the cities to get their health checked,” he told New Sarawak Tribune.
For workers working in the city, he said a ‘time slip’ might be more appropriate and acceptable for their employers.
“Therefore, additional leave might not benefit all, but it is true for some,” he said.
On what are the reasons many still do not go for health checkup and was it due to time limitation or due to a lack of awareness and knowledge to perform check-ups when reaching a certain age, Dr Helmy said those with better health awareness will find and make time to go for check-ups.
“Health screening is known as a secondary prevention activity, where a person might already have a disease but has not shown any symptoms yet, for example, high blood pressure.
“Health screening aims to get people who are newly diagnosed to be treated early and prevent complications,” he pointed out.
On the other hand, he said primary prevention activities should be done more, as they aim to prevent a person from developing a disease.
“The examples could include incentives for people who have walked ten thousand steps, people who maintain an ideal BMI, people who eat healthily, and others, which focus more on the process and proactive adoption of healthy lifestyles.
“This would be the best investment in workers’ health… preventing chronic diseases while we still can,” he said.
Having said that, Dr Helmy stressed that health screening is very important.
“But what is more important are the actions taken by the workers after the health screening.
“A clean bill of health today means that the person needs to do more to maintain the healthy status in the following year, as ageing is a non-modifiable factor that is closely related to chronic diseases,” he said.
