Consulting services
This refers to circumstances where an employee with health issues requires important decisions (“judgements”) to be made, impacting their work.
Three scenarios that may warrant the opinion of an occupational medicine specialist include:
An employee is medically fit to work when the employee has no physical or mental impairments that adversely impact the employee’s ability to perform the inherent task requirements of the job safely, and to the required standard, within the working conditions associated with the job.
See illustrative image below:
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OH Systems
An occupational disease is an impairment of the normal structure or function of a body part or system that is manifested by symptoms and/or signs, and which is attributed to (caused by) exposure to a workplace hazard, either entirely or in part.
These causal links may be:
To determine the presence of an occupational disease, consider: (this step is called case investigation and is conducted by the OH team)
If a clinical diagnosis of an occupational disease is made, the following must happen:
The employer must initiate an incident investigation, the purpose being to determine the root cause for the incident, so as to implement corrective actions (a legal requirement)!
If the incident investigation confirms the presence of an occupational disease, line management shall seek ways to reduce the exposures by implementing the hierarchy of controls, as applicable – namely:
OHN shall initiate measures to identify employees from similar exposure profiles that may also have acquired the occupational disease.
The medical team shall communicate the results of the medical screen to:
All three of these are required by law (OH&SA sections 24 & 25, as well as Regulation 8(4)) of the General Administrative Regulations of the OHSA.
If a compensable disease is diagnosed, the OHN & OMP shall complete the forms required for submission to the Offices of the Compensation Commissioner. These include the following basic set (others are applicable depending upon the circumstances):
The OHN shall coordinate the submission of these forms to the COID offices.
The OMP shall conduct a “return to work assessment” on the affected employee prior to his return to work. This is done cognisant of the requirements of the jobs to which the employee is returning, ensuring he is fit for duty, thereby not endangering their own, or other’s health and safety.
This step ends with a return to work fitness assessment, to ensure that the employee with an occupational disease is suitable to return to his previous job.
Employee care:
Occupational disease reporting:
The image below illustrates the legal reporting obligations for the most common occupational disease, noise induced hearing loss.
