Mental health and HIV among call centre employees in the Philippines: Co-producing a workplace intervention using a systems approach.

Call centres are a fast-growing industry in the Philippines. Although well-paid, call centre employees have little control over their work, must deal regularly with angry clients, and must meet high demands under time pressure. These stressful conditions can lead to mental ill-health which can affect their performance at work as well as whether they take risks with their health, and whether they have positive social relationships.

Poor mental health can also affect how well the organisation performs; it can lead to lower productivity, increased sickness absence and higher staff turnover rates.

At the same time, the Philippines has the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world and call centre employees are believed to be at risk due to high levels of unprotected sexual activity. High-stress and high disposable income in this young workforce, combined with a relatively high proportion of men who have sex with men (MSM), are also thought to contribute to increased HIV risk.

Stigma and discrimination around sexual identity, behaviour and HIV status are both contributors to poor mental ill health.

Previous research has shown that poor mental health and HIV risk often exist together and each makes the other worse, particularly where people also experience things like stigma and discrimination. For this reason, researchers have urged that the two health issues should be tacked together. There are lots of effective ways to address mental health and reduce HIV in workplace settings but little work has been done to bring these together, and little has been done to address issues specific to call centres in LMIC.

The aim of this project is to understand how the workplace setting (or system) shapes both mental health and HIV risk. We will work with call centre employees and their managers to understand their priorities and identify aspects of the workplace that they think could provide potential solutions. Having agreed on these solutions we will try them out in the workplace and ask managers and employers for their views on how well they address the issues, how easy they are to implement and whether they represent value for money.

The solutions will need to consider the physical environment, working culture and wider social influences to ensure it is acceptable, and easy to deliver in the long-term. The project will involve workshops with employees and managers, as well as interviews with employees and outside experts. Our aim will be to come up with a final design that call centres and stakeholders in industry and government think would be worth evaluating on a wider scale.

We will also share lessons with other researchers on methods for designing interventions in corporate settings.