Screening & Advice

Drug and alcohol screening

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development assess the cost to UK businesses of drug and alcohol misuse to be £800m per year.

Employees with drink and drug problems also pose significant health and safety hazards in the workplace and are challenging to manage. We work with organisations to develop policies and procedures to ensure that programmes are accepted by the workforce and legally compliant. Our testing is fully compliant with best practice procedures, including chain of custody. We arrange for specialist referral where appropriate and support employees through the recovery process.

Health surveillance

Health surveillance programmes enable organisations to detect occupational ill-health early and comply with Health & Safety legislation. We have a set of modular programmes for most workplace hazards which meet Health & Safety Executive requirements.

Wherever possible we co-ordinate screening around operational needs for the least disruption and greatest cost-effectiveness. Our safety practitioners then work with organisations to further minimise risks, as required under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations and allied legislation.

Our programmes include:

• Stress
• COSHH
• Respiratory
• Skin
• Noise
• Hand arm vibration syndrome
• Asbestos
• Ionising radiation

Specialist health surveillance:

• Biological work
• Chemical work
• Activities with GMOs (class 2 and above)
• Activities with dangerous pathogens
• Exposure to lead
• Exposure to handling of animals

Medical advice

To help your organisation deal with sickness absence, especially absence that is not short term and may be the result of a serious medical condition, you need advice from someone with a detailed knowledge of all types of occupations and working environments. Our occupational health physicians will provide you with independent medical reports and can liaise with other health professionals.

There will be times when your employees suffer from illness or disability that impacts on their ability to work, or they may decide that their health has been adversely affected by their work.

In those circumstances we can provide you with the specialist medical advice you require.

Our physician can examine your member of staff and write to their doctor or specialist so that he or she has all the information needed to produce a comprehensive medical report on their employability and to suggest any special workplace adjustments or arrangements that are needed.

A medical report is normally required to assess eligibility for ill health retirement benefits. Our physician can provide such a report following a consultation and examination, if necessary.

We can advise you on the application of the Equality Act 2010 (our Medical Advisor, in addition to being a consultant occupational physician, also has an LLM in Law and Employment Relations in 2007).

Pre-employment screening

We can process your pre-employment and pre-enrolment questionnaires either on paper or online, with most clients today favouring online processing. We can advise you on the content of your existing questionnaires, making sure they comply with all current legislation, such as the Equality Act, and provide you with new ones if required.

Clients using OHWorks’ online questionnaires can access the questionnaires via a secure link. Our questionnaires are tailormade for each client.