Why do you need it?
Pre-employment medical assessments need to consider specific work practices, legislation and compensation. The ageing of our workforce – with people living and working for longer – brings with it the impact of chronic disease.
A well-designed pre-employment medical will assist in determining if the worker is fit for the tasks of the role without foreseeable and significant risk to themselves or others. However, it is only the first stage in your risk management approach
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While there are legislated medicals whose contents are mandated, such as those in rail, aviation and some mining operations; in most cases, there is no ‘one-size fits all’ pre-employment medical assessment.
“If not well-designed and conducted, a pre-employment assessment is, at-best, an expensive, non-valid snap-shot in time.” – Dr Rob McCartney
Our Occupational Physicians can recommend the best strategy for employment health assessment for your organisation – keeping your risk management goals in mind. We will assist you in designing and implementing a best practice solution for your pre-employment medicals, the first step in managing the health risk of your workforce.
How does it work?
We arrange pre-employment medicals and periodic health assessments nationally and internationally including those required under legislated schemes.
Multiple sites? Multiple providers? We assist clients to maintain consistent fitness for duty decisions at pre-employment and periodically, no matter where the medical assessment is conducted.
A well designed, risk based assessment, considers more than just the risk on that day, but also a projection of risk into the future. Assessing this risk requires expertise offered by our consultant specialists who consider the whole health of an individual.
We deliver quality-controlled assessments, compliance with legislation and consistent determinations of fitness.
Resile clients benefit from our proprietary management system for ensuring fitness for duty. This is available for both pre-employment medicals and periodic health assessments.
As a proprietary system developed and refined over years and in partnership with industry, our suite of specialist assessment tools delivers:
- consistent, reliable fitness for duty
- prompt service
- accessible, affordable specialist risk management.
FAQs
We have a number of clients who face this challenge. Every day we help organisations to provide consistent fitness for duty decisions across the country – including those who operate in remote and regional areas. The determination on fitness is made based on evidence-based algorithms no matter where the assessment takes place.
We agree that a traditional pre-employment assessment will have limited benefit for some employment groups and industries. Our expert Occupational Physicians can advise you on the right approach to pre-employment assessment that will provide you with a cost effective approach to meet your needs. Contact us to speak in more detail about your specific needs.
A pre-employment assessment should always be based upon the specific tasks of the role. For safety critical roles it is important to ensure an applicant can safely undertake these activities. For white collar workers there would be a different focus, and different tools recommended – we won’t be focusing on manual handling risks or risk of sudden incapacity, but there may be concerned about psychological risks. Our physicians look at the context of risk in your organisation and then advise appropriate assessment tools.
People change with time. They develop illness, have accidents and change personal situations. All of these have an impact on their health, which in turn potentially affects their ability to safely perform their role.
A pre-employment medical is only valid until there is a significant change in the individual’s physical or psychological health.
We would be happy to discuss the risk decision with a client on employing someone who has a had a medical and there are questions on whether the medical is still current. We do not prescribe an automatic validity period and where it is determined that the risk is too high to accept rather than repeating the whole medical (at considerable expense to the client) we offer solutions like revisiting medical history with the applicant.
Some medical assessments are performed at regular intervals (periodic assessments) after the initial pre-employment medical is performed. In many industries, this is regulated by either legislation, by the doctor who is determining the individual’s fitness, or both. This is done in recognition that a pre-employment medical has limitations.
When managing health risk in a workplace, a pre-employment medical is only the first step.
