Overseas travel for your employees can be enjoyable, but at the same time there is no discounting that it put a certain amount of stress on the human body. Long planes flights (even business class isn’t what it used to be), disrupted sleep schedules due to the change of time zones and exigencies of travel, and so on, can all stress anyone from a junior employee to a seasoned senior executive. Then add to that exposure to unfamiliar pathogens, and we’re getting nervous about our employees abroad. Getting sick is never fun, but when an illness is added to the other stresses, suddenly employee overseas medical assistance can go from being a theoretical “safety net” option to a clear and pressing need.
Employee Overseas Medical Assistance: A Not-So-Simple Case of Flu
To see how a simple case of the flu can escalate to the point where employee overseas medical assistance is might be needed, follow the the actions of a hypothetical traveler from Canada who just landed in the tropics. This person unknowingly already had a mild case of the flu, but this was ignored in the run-up to the trip. 
The day after arrival symptoms like fever started to manifest, but they put it down to lack of acclimatization to the tropical heat. One day two they were feeling distinctly worse, but of course there was work to do–the whole reason for the trip was business–and so soldiered on. By day three the flu laid them low, and in their weakened state they got a local bacterial infection from impure water, and they become dehydrated. Suddenly this traveler is at significant medical risk.
What might be a simple problem in Canada or the United States, can become a major employee crisis in a country such as Mexico or Brazil – not necessarily because of the health care system itself, but because your employee or senior executive is unfamiliar with how the health care system works in that country. And, in addition, he or she is under the weather. Can you imagine trying to navigate the health care system of a foreign country, when you are in ‘good health?’ Now imagine that when you are in ‘bad health.’
A Proven, Trusted Network for Overseas Employee Medical Assistance
You need a trusted friend, a trusted network, and someone who knows how to deal with overseas employee crises. This is the point where IMG Globalsecur employee monitoring tools and a pre-planned employee overseas medical assistance protocol could be a game-changer.
To how IMG Globalsecur can help you plan for just such incidents of employee overseas medical assistance, reach out to us today and have one of our friendly staff conduct an employee overseas monitoring audit and demo the available software.
In terms of employee travel security, here are some important things to think about. First, how many of your employees actually travel abroad? You might have just one or two key executives, or you might have literally hundreds of employees in tens of countries across the world. The quantity makes a difference because, of course, it is more difficult to track a large number of people, and keep them secure and informed, then it is to track a small number of people. Second, which countries are your employees deployed to? It makes a difference, of course, whether these employees are deployed into relatively secure countries like Germany or France, or countries which unfortunately have a more complicated security situation, such as Turkey, Afghanistan, or Guatemala. Now, that is not to say, that only countries in the developing world faced security challenges! As recent events in France have shown, even countries in Western Europe can face significant security challenges, and these challenges can impact your employees. Third, what are the priorities not only of your organization but of the employees themselves? In some situations, such as that of United States defense contractors, the organization itself has to have a very secure profile. Whereas in others, such as a small business, or perhaps a consumer oriented company, the security situation is not as complicated from the perspective of the organization. Next, seen from the perspective of the employees themselves, some employees may be participatory in monitoring systems, whereas in other organizations the employees are more willing to take the risks on themselves.