BE – Health is contagious - Kempinski Hotels launches first project in Bangkok

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Category: Hotel

Created on Thursday, 03 May 2012 10:57

BE – Health is contagious - Kempinski Hotels launches first project in Bangkok

Kempinski Hotels is once again actively fighting infectious diseases with the foundation of BE, a legally independent, self-funding, non-profit organisation with one goal: to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which rank among the world’s most common infectious diseases. BE’s name stands for the verb ‘to be’ – representing life and health as the basis for people to ‘be’. BE provides the basis and the access to information about health and its promotion.

This is also interesting for other internationally-operating small and medium-seized companies, as it is often difficult for them to get support from official bodies, NGO's and health organisations on site. Therefore, BE welcomes additional further members who would like to fulfil their social responsibility towards their employees, families and local communities, and who are convinced that the workplace is the ideal place to spread health. As both the Chairman of BE’s Advisory Board and Director of the Stop TB department of the World Health Organisation, Dr. Mario Raviglione supports the association with his expertise in health care, providing advice on project implementation. BE’s first project has just been launched in Thailand.

BE projects focus on spreading information about the diseases, their symptoms and the various ways of getting infected, with one clear objective – to share knowledge and information and change people’s behaviour in order to detect the diseases at an earlier stage and facilitate treatment. Over the next few days, BE’s first project will start at the Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok. Carefully selected employees from the hotel undergo intense training and are informed about the diseases, their causes and possible treatments, with a view to becoming peer educators for their local community. Local healthcare partners such as Raks Thai Foundation, a member of CARE International, assist and support them.

A pilot project starting in May with four participating Kempinski hotels will inform guests about BE, and one Euro or Swiss franc will automatically be added to the guests’ invoice – this can be removed at any time upon the guest’s request, but of course, guests can also request to increase their donation. The donation collection will be rolled out in phases to other Kempinski hotels in order to guarantee funding for future BE activities worldwide. The specific use of the donations will be published in the annual report of BE and audited by Deloitte.