Cost Cutting

My wife is into Health Care industry and she works for a company which provides health care services to the corporate. She is part of operations as well as business development and quite often she has to go for client visits. They have various kinds of health care services to impress the HR of the companies they visit. Organizing health camp within the premises of the organization is quite popular among the HR  community. Companies usually organize free eye checkup, free dental checkup, free heart checkup and so on. With some big companies they have a little different kind of business called “OHC”. Don’t worry if you are not familiar with the term, for me these terms are just part and parcel of my everyday life. OHC is basically “Occupational Health Care”, which is nothing but a kind of dispensary set-up within the organization itself. HR's usually outsource these kind of services to those companies which provide health care services. The minimum requirement for an OHC is to have a doctor and nurse with necessary arrangement of basic medicines/first aids. Also there should be an ambulance along with a driver ready for any kind of emergency 24/7.

The OHC concept was initiated by the “WHO” and is actually a primary health care service that any organization can provide to their employees working in factories, construction sites, refineries and many such organizations where there is considerable amount of probability for the employees to get hurt. But now days the concept is not limited to such organizations, it’s within the HR policies of some of the large software companies as well. Now for doctors as well as for nurses it’s a pretty cool job. In the whole day few employees would visit the OHC for their minor problems. The visiting frequency could be a little higher if the doctor on duty is an admirable one. Whenever any employee visit the OHC with a little serious problem the doctor never hesitate to recommend him/her to a bigger hospital.  

One day my wife was in the middle of a discussion with a client and all of a sudden the client shared one of their OHC experiences. They said that they have outsourced their OHC to a health care company the previous year and everything looked so perfect, as all the doctors and nurses were quite good and the OHC was open 24/7. The client said that the OHC also had an ambulance for any kind of emergency. The OHC guys were quite professional,  specially the ambulance driver. The driver usually used to chill out but was always visible in and around the OHC. Whenever any patient employee used to visit the OHC, the driver stood proudly in his  neat and clean uniform near the ambulance. He looked very enthusiastic  as if he was fully prepared for any sort of emergency and  almost ready to take the patient  employee to a hospital.

Now in a software company what kind of emergency one can expect?  Hiring ambulance drivers for 24/7 and literally doing nothing is  a waste of money but we never know when any emergency kind of  situation might develop? Also it's a part of the business deal that ambulance driver should be available 24/7. The client lady said that after almost 6 months of setting up the OHC one day they had an emergency situation as one of their employee had a mild heart attack. Some of the HR people also came along with the patient to the OHC that moment. The doctor out there suggested  to transfer the patient immediately to a nearby hospital. The ambulance driver as usual was very enthusiastic but was a little nervous that time. Initially he had to struggle a lot  to start the ambulance and once it started in no time the vehicle had a head-on collision with the nearby wall.