Workforce testing: 'improves the bottom line'.

• Author: Slaten, Russ
• Position: HEALTHCARE

Medical-based occupational testing runs the gamut of healthcare management for industries as wide as oil and gas and transportation to fisheries and retail. Companies across the state offer onboarding exams, functional capacity evaluations, drug and alcohol testing, and federally-mandated exams like respirator fit tests and audiograms.

Alaska's safety-sensitive industries like construction, oil and gas, mining, and transportation are heavily involved with workforce testing due to the nature of the work and regulations from federal entities like the Department of Transportation and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Growth in Safety

Concerns for employee health and safety have grown beyond the safety-sensitive industries like mining and oil and gas to affect nearly all industries, in part due to a return on investment through properly addressing worker safety and health, says Dennis Spencer, director of medical services at Fairweather LLC.

Fairweather LLC, an Edison Chouest Offshore Company, has provided medical support to the state's natural resource industry for nearly forty years and currently provides services on the North Slope through the Fairweather Deadhorse Medical Clinic.

Making money and generating revenue is core to business, and utilizing an effective health and safety plan that includes workforce testing is a value-added approach to workplace efficiency, Spencer says.

"Incidents in the workplace and injured employees are expensive--exposing companies to liability along with the emotional and psychological costs for the employee and the employer," Spencer says. "Companies have come around over the last few decades in seeing the value of taking a proactive role in ensuring their employees are healthy and safe before beginning work with post-offer exams, drug testing, or a mix of the two as well as periodic screening of the workforce. Workforce screening-medical as well as drug and alcohol testing--improves the bottom line."

Beyond simply identifying employees that may be unsafe in a specific job function prior to placement, good programs offer other benefits as well. For example, good drug and alcohol policies and procedures allow leaders to evaluate employees that may self-identify as needing help with addiction, and the policy would not only answer how to handle this disclosure but how to handle post-treatment surveillance. This saves the most valuable resource most companies have, the people.

Identify Needs

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