The Health Check

The next few posts are a series of interesting things that happened to us, or we learned over the first week in China… Interesting can be funny, weird, sad, or all 3… Here’s the first in the series…

The Health Check

Thank god for coming to China with a large multi-national company that contracts with a local immigration company to assist with the process of ‘dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s to allow us to remain in China and not get un-ceremonially tossed out on our American kiesters (Microsoft does not recognize this as a word? Really?).

To get our shipment of goods from the US, we need to have our Work Permit. To get our Work Permit, we have to have our Residence Permit. To get our Residence Permit we have to have our Health Check, to have our Health Check we have to have our Temporary Residence Permit, and to get our temporary residence permit, we had to be in China. It sounds a little like those ‘If you give a Moose a Muffin’ stories for kids but there it is.

Deloitte is Intel’s contracted Immigration expert in Shanghai. Before I left the US, they contacted me and let me know they would be helping me with the ‘first this, then that’ listed above. The first step they asked me to complete was getting a temporary residence permit from the management company where I live, or from the local police station. This was easy since the Relo company here in Shanghai met us at the apartment and took care of that.

So Deloitte meets us at the hotel and we get in a cab – all 6 of us (taxi driver, Deloitte contact, Steph, Joe and 2 kids) and take a 40 minute cab ride – sans car seats – to the government health clinic. When we got there, we were among about 6 other people being ‘processed’. As inappropriate a word as that sounds, it’s exactly what was happening. Deloitte greased the skids for a lot of this, but here’s what I think went down:

• Check in with the staff, fill out paperwork on Steph and me
• Move to a waiting area where we get a number assigned for moving to the next step
• When our number is called, we move to a room where one woman insures our paperwork is filled out correctly
• When she OKs our paperwork we move to a gentlemen sitting directly across from her, who checks the same paperwork, and then provides the stickers that will travel with our blood samples - the previous woman could not have done both?
• We move to the changing area – this is, by the way, where I met the only person in China in 5 days that was not perfectly pleasant… I guess if you job was to tell people to strip from the waste up and put on a robe that doesn’t fit, you might not be pleasant either? (Side note – the robe provided had a string on either side, apparently for tying… but there seemed to be no way to use the ties to actually get the roes to close… thus, the men walked around with the robes open (remember, we were asked to only remove clothing from the waste up), and women walked around with one hand constantly holding he robe closed... Side Note #2: Our friend Tom, who is roughly 6’3 and has probably size 12 shoes made the comment that it didn’t matter how he tried to put the booties over his shoes, they just wouldn’t fit!)
• From the changing area, the next stop for everyone seemed to be getting your blood sample taken. This was a little daunting, as you are not 100% sold on the quality of the people involved in this government assembly line of health, and things are done just slightly differently here (iodine instead of alcohol, everyone getting blood drawn in the same room, at the same exact spot, on the same pillow by the same nurse)… it was quick and painless – thank goodness
• The next step is where things got comical… there were roughly 6 different medical checks that had to happen to get ‘released’ and they were in 6 different rooms off the same long hallway; as you came out of the room you just finished a little gal looked at your sheet to see what you were missing and guided you to the next room, and you were constantly passing the same 6-8 other people being bounced among these rooms
• Chest x-rays – where you basically hugged the X-ray machine
• EKG – with these metal clamps for wrists and ankles, and tin foil covered suction cups for your chest
• Ultrasound – seemingly checking your kidneys for kidney stones?
• General check up – ‘you ever break bones’? ‘you healthy’? Then a very cursory check of the abdomen and glands… seriously, this guys touch was so light, he was either a shaman of sorts, or just phoning it in… not that I minded ‘less invasive’ over ‘more invasive’
• Eye exam – all the letters were either M or W or the number 3… and it was taken with eye glasses and/or contacts in, so really at the end of the day, I think what they did was confirm I have the right prescription?
• Steph had to have a breast exam, and despite how out of shape I am, my breasts must just be small enough to have exempted me from that one :)
  
  When we finished, the guy from Deloitte said, “let me go pay and make express check out”… Sure enough in about 40 seconds he got us out of a room full of people waiting to pay and get final processing complete. More than one person looked a little perturbed that we seemingly 'skipped a step'.
  
  On our way out we noticed the waiting room had filled to the brim with people. At least 20-25 people had just walked in, and were starting off the process (my guess is a batch of teachers coming in for one of the Int’l Schools – timing is right and they all spoke English). This is another key benefit of coming with a big company that contracts with a local company to help you manage through this process… He knew the right time of day to schedule this thing as to avoid the crowd.
  
  So you can judge for yourself… was the health check focused on insuring the people coming to China are healthy and not carrying diseases? Is it to insure that people coming to China feel the appropriate amount of ‘the government is in charge’? Is it to keep some of the population in jobs? Or is it a service designed to insure the US Ophthalmologists are assigning the right prescriptions?