CARS Madrid, the Healthcare and Rehabilitation Centre promoted by SEAT and Volkswagen Financial Services is now operational and has started to offer healthcare and prevention services to the 1,350 employees of the Volkswagen Group in Madrid. With this centre, SEAT and Volkswagen Financial Services consolidate their commitment to the health and well-being of the Volkswagen Group’s employees in Spain.
Located in the finance company’s corporate headquarters in Alcobendas, this new advanced medicine facility offers health services in the areas of occupational medicine, nursing consultations, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, as well as health monitoring and medical examinations.
The facilities include a room for periodic check-ups for all Volkswagen Group employees in Madrid free of charge, with an area for nurses to provide assistance if necessary and a medical office for occupational medicine visits. It also has a fully equipped physiotherapy and rehabilitation room. In addition, CARS Madrid has direct access for ambulances and emergency services, and in the future expects to include more specialised health care services.
According to SEAT Vice-president for Human Resources and Organisation Xavier Ros “we’re proud to be able to extend to the Madrid team the commitment that SEAT has had for years to health and wellbeing and which, during the pandemic, has translated into a massive use of PCR tests to prevent infection among our 15,000 workers. CARS Madrid embodies the vision we had when we created our CARS in Martorell, which is to offer first-class health services, far exceeding the limits of occupational medicine.”
The President of Volkswagen Financial Services in Spain, Pedro Catena, adds: “We’re very happy to have made such an exciting project as this new centre a reality in just a few months. With the creation of CARS Madrid at Volkswagen Financial Services, together with the SEAT team and the Joint Prevention Service, we show that we are capable of achieving extraordinary things when it comes to the health of our employees.”
SEAT Health, Safety and Emergency Director Dr. Patricia Such says that “we’re extending our vision of health with the services that we’re now starting to offer at CARS Madrid, which for us is undoubtedly one of the biggest commitments we can make to our employees, even more so in times like these.”
SEAT, a benchmark of corporate health
Following the opening of CARS in Martorell in 2017, the creation of the SEAT Healthy Company Scientific Committee, the extension of the Joint Prevention Service to almost 20,000 Group employees in Spain, and now with the creation of CARS Madrid, SEAT is consolidated as a benchmark in health and well-being in the corporate environment.
In 2019, the CARS centre in Martorell scheduled more than 82,825 appointments to prevent and attend to health and welfare issues for a total of 18,841 SEAT employees and Volkswagen Group companies in Spain. Of these visits, 9,000 corresponded to consultations with specialists in Orthopedics or Gynecology. In addition, more than 20,000 physiotherapy sessions and more than 12,000 personalised training sessions were carried out at CARSFit.
In addition to the eight medical specialities it has, this centre features the first in-company biomechanics laboratory in Spain geared towards health in the workplace, whose mission is to optimise the design of workstations according to muscular effort and joint rotation. In 2019, 600 biomechanical tests were performed in this lab.
In parallel to the opening of CARS and as part of the company’s commitment to health, SEAT created the SEAT Healthy Company Scientific Committee, made up of experts from different organisations linked to health, such as the renowned researcher and epidemiologist Bonaventura Clotet, and researchers from Harvard University or the Hospital Clínic, who research health-related issues. These include the pioneering MedCARS study, which confirms the direct correlation between the Mediterranean diet, changing habits and an improvement in some of the main health indicators. With this type of study, the company aims to provide society as a whole with tools to help progress and improve its knowledge on health.
SOURCE: SEAT
