Occupational health and safety legislation entrenches the requirement for employers to create and sustain a safe and healthy working environment. The easiest way for an employer to measure whether their employees’ health is being adversely affected by their work environment is to conduct medical surveillance and monitor sick leave absenteeism.

Medical surveillance is defined as a planned program of periodic examinations (which may include clinical examinations, biological monitoring or medical tests) of employees by an occupational health practitioner or, in prescribed cases, by an occupational medical practitioner.

The key questions are always;

Underlying these questions is the implication that some sort of management system is required to meet this legal requirement. IsoMetrix provides a vehicle to manage occupational health and safety with the inclusion of the medical surveillance component to ensure that incidents or occurrences of adverse health effects or injuries are identified early and appropriate effort made to reduce risk and manage existing health problems.

Let us look at the key questions and see how IsoMetrix can assist you with managing occupational health.
 

1. “Who must have medical surveillance?”

Identification of all the legal requirements for medical surveillance will be the starting point. By using the IsoMetrix risk assessment component which has been configured to meet your organizations specific needs, you will be able to identify the health hazards, rate risk and prioritize risk for reduction and /or implement risk control measures which will include medical surveillance. Using IsoMetrix your hazard identification is done in a structured manner according to the organizational levels e.g.

By linking an employee to a job category, HEG, Department and Section you are able to draw a risk profile for the individual. You are then able to make a decision as to what medical tests need to be done as well as the frequency of testing. By creating risk based protocols for medical surveillance you are able to plan the medical surveillance to determine if employees are suffering from work related adverse health effects.

When capturing the medical test results in IsoMetrix you have an option to ‘log an incident’ if a test result falls outside the normal parameters. Logging adverse health effects as incidents will trigger the process to investigate the circumstances to determine why and how the person has been affected by a work exposure e.g. a decrease in hearing acuity of a person working in a noise area.

2. “What tests must be done and how often must the tests be done?”

Medical surveillance should be risk based to ensure cost effective use of resources. Interrogation of the hazards identified and the concomitant risks will help you decide what tests need to be done for each HEG as well as the frequency of testing so that adverse health effects can be identified early.

Having determined the frequencies of testing you are able to compile a program of testing and schedule each employee for their medical examinations.

3. “For how long must record be kept?"

There are several legal requirements for keeping medical surveillance records and your record retention time will be determined by the types of hazards. The longest retention time currently is 40 years from date of last entry.

One only has to think briefly about this to realize that the medical surveillance recordkeeping can become quite onerous.

IsoMetrix provides an option to store medical records electronically with the added benefits;

Utilizing the medical surveillance component of IsoMetrix brings the management of adverse health effects into the main stream of management instead of it becoming a side issue. The advantage of this will be: