HEALTH RISKS AND HEALTH SURVEILLANCE

Overview

Risk assessments coupled with appropriate health surveillance are tools which enable you, as an employer, to monitor your employees to prevent work-related ill-health. The type of health surveillance which is required is dependant upon the risks that your employees are exposed to in their job. These can be identified by a risk assessment.

Examples of health surveillance include:

		audiometric tests for employees exposed to noise;
		skin surveillance for employees exposed to oils and other potentially harmful chemicals;
		lung function tests for employees exposed to dust and other respiratory sensitisors;
		assessment of employees who travel abroad regularly to ensure that the travel is not detrimental to their physical or mental well-being;
		vision screening for DSE users;
		monitoring pregnant employees;
		monitoring employees who require statutory examinations (e.g. climbers, fork lift truck drivers, PCV drivers etc).

How Health Surveillance benefits your Organisation

The benefits of health surveillance include the following:

		helps you to comply with health and safety legislation;
		enables you to identify work related activities that may be harmful to employees’ health;
		helps to identify employees who may have pre-existing health problems which may affect their ability to perform their job;
		ensures that those employed in safety critical jobs (e.g. train drivers, bus drivers, heavy goods vehicle drivers, fork lift drivers) have an adequate level of fitness to reduce the likelihood of an employee’s ill-health impacting on the employee’s or public’s safety;
		allows you to assess whether the control measures you have put in place (e.g. ear defenders) are effective;
		provides a baseline health profile so that any claim for compensation for work-related ill-health can be assessed in terms of the health of the employee when they joined the organisation.

How we can help you

We can help you set up appropriate health surveillance programmes. These can include:

		conducting initial risk assessments to determine what type of health surveillance is required;
		providing competent occupational health personnel to undertake the health surveillance;
		ensuring that all health surveillance results are reviewed clinically by an occupational physician;
		introducing management reports outlining the results of the health surveillance, trends, and action recommendations.

For more information on how we can help, please contact us.