MANY domestic workers and babysitters in Shenzhen aren’t required to do standard medical checkups by household service agencies, which might pose a threat to the health of their employers, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported Thursday.

A Shenzhen resident, surnamed Xie, said his 3-year-old daughter was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was passed to the child from their babysitter. Xie said, he regretted that he didn’t take the babysitter to do a checkup at a hospital before hiring her.

According to the city’s chronic disease control center, residents should pay close attention to the health of their domestic workers because domestic workers with infectious diseases are very likely to infect children and the elderly.

A Daily reporter, who pretended to be a jobseeker, visited several household service agencies in Futian District on Tuesday. One of the agencies is named Zhongjia Household Service, and its Lianhuabei branch head, surnamed Wang, said doctors from “Shenzhen Traditional Hospital” would help new employees do blood tests to check for Hepatitis B at the company’s office.

But the reporter couldn’t find any information about this hospital on the Internet. A staffer from another housekeeping agency, Haojiemei Household Service, said this hospital doesn’t have an address, but that the company could call in doctors from the hospital to do checkups or blood tests for new employees.

Three other household service agencies told the reporter that new employees can do medical checkups at the hospital on their own, and that they need to submit their medical reports to the agencies before starting work. According to Wang though, jobseekers could ask someone else to do the checkups on their behalf to avoid undergoing the tests themselves.

However, the agencies usually would ask jobseekers to sign their medical reports and declare that they would be fully responsible for the reports, Wang said.

To test this information, asked his colleague to do a Hepatitis B blood test under his name at a Shenzhen hospital Wednesday, and lo and behold the nurse didn’t verify the patient’s identity before taking a blood sample from the reporter’s colleague.

Chen Renjie, secretary general of the city’s household service industry association, said the lack of standard medical checkups for domestic workers is a problem faced by the whole household service industry. He said the association has urged household service agencies to ask their employees to do medical checkups at accredited hospitals.

Chen said usually the household service agencies would check if new employees were sick with any infectious diseases, but the employees are not required to submit reports about their medical history. Chen said the household service industry should raise its standards for health screenings of domestic workers in the future. (Zhang Yang)