Introducing ‘Better Living’ in Collaboration With Doctorola

Today we are excited to announce an entirely new section called ‘Better Living’-a health and wellness blog for entrepreneurs and makers from Future Startup. The initiative, supported by Doctorola, a healthcare startup based in Dhaka, aims to bring in-depth reporting and analysis on the healthy lifestyle for entrepreneurs and inside stories of the healthcare industry in Bangladesh. Unlike many health tips sections, we plan to bring you worth reading content specifically catered to entrepreneurs and makers and insightful stories of the healthcare industry in Bangladesh.

We believe health has a significant impact on our lives. It dictates our capacity to work and contribute and plays a huge role in our success or failure.

For companies, it has widespread impact. Healthy people are capable of delivering more and work harder and generate better ideas. Contrary, a challenging health condition creates productivity problem, even causes productivity slumps.

Startups globally compete on offering health benefits to employees and often promote a healthy lifestyle. In Silicon Valley and other growing startup cities, early stage companies are offering special health program in order to attract and retain talent and get best out of their employees. Various reports suggest that these programs often result in higher employee loyalty and productivity and lower healthcare cost, burnout, and absenteeism.

While offering tips and tricks for healthy living, through Better Living section we plan to look at how companies are dealing with health issues for employees, what they think about health programs and how these things are affecting the performance of employees in companies and subsequently performance of an organization in Bangladesh. We will come up with ideas from experts on living a better life, building an organization that empowers its people to live a healthy life and do better.

In Bangladesh, this is an often overlooked factor. We take this thing for granted at individual levels and at the organizational level. Moreover, entrepreneurs and creative people who are often working harder and chasing next deadline do it at the expense of their health. We plan to help people to break that pattern.

Optum, a health care firm based in the US, conducted a research on promotion of healthy lifestyle in the workplace in 2010. The firm surveyed 1,444 adults living in the U.S for two months resulting in a wide variety of findings regarding health program by companies. Below is a list of findings:

• Close to nine in 10 employees (87 percent) considered it appropriate for employers to encourage workers to take steps to be healthy.
• More than eight in 10 (84 percent) believed that workplace wellness programs showed that an employer cared about its employees and that it would increase their productivity (73 percent).
• Eight in 10 employees (82 percent) who worked at companies with health and wellness programs said such programs would encourage them to stay longer at a company.
• Those who worked in companies that emphasized health felt that they had more control over maintaining a healthy lifestyle at work than those who did not (92 percent versus 79 percent).
• Six in ten people surveyed — who had successfully lost weight or quit smoking — reported that a workplace program was very helpful to their success.

Source: Opitum

Contextually, many would argue that these findings not relevant to our culture in Bangladesh. But this can’t be any further from the truth. We are living in a time when people are regularly exposed to better lifestyle from the other end of the world and are adopting those trends fast. Hence, employees today in Dhaka also expect a workplace that cares about them. While talent is scarce and keeping talent is a challenge, we better be ready for it.

The same research indicates that about 34% respondents associate productivity with wellness program whereas 39% think it has some sort of association.

A culture of promoting health living in companies often result in better retention rate and loyalty among employees.

Healthcare is gaining increasing importance in Bangladesh. The government aims to achieve universal health coverage by 2023 that will pay 70% of the medical expenses instead of the 26% paid currently [LCP].

Private spending on health care is growing and is likely to grow in coming years given the economic progress we are making. 62% of our healthcare expenditure come from the private pocket, which is USD 32 per capita, and a significant portion of this money goes to drug and consultation whereas prevention measures only account for 11.2% of total healthcare expenditure (MOHFW, 2003). This shows how little we pay attention to preventative measures while a majority of health risk can be avoided if we maintain a healthy lifestyle and take preventative measures.

While offering health-related lifestyle ideas and expert opinions on better living, we aim to promote the idea of prevention through this initiative.

Summary: What to expect from this new section

• In-depth, long-form reporting and analysis on health living
• Health and work
• Workplace healthcare in Bangladesh
• Health and productivity
• Health tips
• Entrepreneurs on healthy living
• Experts on healthy living
• Breakthrough in health and medicine Industry in Bangladesh

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About our partner:
This Initiative and the stories are made possible by our friends at Doctorola.com, a Bangladeshi health-tech initiative helping people to get Doctor’s appointment online, whose generosity enables us to publish premium stories online at no cost to our readers. Thank you, Doctorola.com, for teaming up with us.