Health Checkup for Migrant Workers Available in Mother Tongues
By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Migrant workers here will now be able to receive the results of medical checkups in their mother tongues.
The service comes 16 years after the nation began to actively invite migrant employees along with the industrial trainee system in 1994.
The Ministry of Labor said Monday that foreign workers can have medical examination forms and detailed information of each examination item written in both Korean and their mother tongues.
``Migrant workers are required to receive a checkup every one or two years, but have had difficulty in understanding the report as they were written only in Korean. They could ask their Korean colleagues, but full understanding was not really possible because of difficult medical terminology,'' ministry official Cha Sang-ho said.
``A Thai worker, for example, can ask for an examination form in his mother tongue. When the checkup results are sent to him weeks later, it will also be in the Thai language,'' he said.
Besides English, native languages of nine countries will be available: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Indonesia, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
For better understanding of difficult medical terminology, a tripartite telephony service will also be available, allowing migrant workers to communicate with medical staff through an interpreter.
``We hope the new system will help foreign workers maintain good health and prevent vocational diseases,'' Cha said.
As of March, 470,000 foreign employees were working in Korea under the work permit system, which replaced the industrial trainee system, the ministry said. The figure does not include those overstaying their visas. ``Illegal migrant workers should undergo medical checkups in principle. But it is not easy to make them do it,'' he said.
In 2008, 119 foreign employees had vocational diseases and 18 of them died. In 2007, there were 138 cases which resulted in 20 deaths.