Health Surveillance
What is health surveillance?
Health surveillance is any activity which involves obtaining information about employees' health and which helps protect employees from health risks at work.
The objectives for health surveillance are:
- Protecting the health of employees by early detection of adverse changes or disease;
- Collecting data for detecting or evaluating health hazards;
- Evaluating control measures.
It should not be confused with general health screening or health promotion.
Health surveillance is necessary when:
- there is a disease associated with the substance in use (eg Asthma http://www.hse.gov.uk/asthma/index.htm, Dermatitis http://www.hse.gov.uk/skin/index.htm , Cancers http://www.hse.gov.uk/cancer/)
- it is possible to detect the disease or adverse change and reduce the risk of further harm;
- the conditions in the workplace make it likely that the disease will appear.
Health surveillance is a process; it may be a regular planned assessment of one or more aspects of a worker's health, for example: lung function testing. Health surveillance is carried out by the Occupational Health Service for individuals at the request of their manager following COSHH risk assessment in line with Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Procedure.
The hierarchy of control diagram demonstrates which actions should be taken first
