In today’s fast-paced working environment, having a reliable, healthy and productive workforce is critical to ensure business continuity. Screening of prospective employees prior to commencing employment can significantly reduce the rates of injury, reduced medical costs resulting from injury and reduced absence from work due to injury.

In this article, we unpack the key benefits of employment medicals and what it takes to build a seamless employment medical process.

What are employment medicals?

Employment medical assessments are a workforce risk management tool used to screen individuals for risk factors that may limit their ability to perform a job safely and effectively. They can be conducted pre, during or post-employment.

The aim of the pre-employment health assessment is to evaluate a person's physical and mental capacity to carry out the tasks inherent in a job and in the environment in which they are to work. The assessment helps to ensure that the job does not cause or aggravate any existing disease or injury and that the characteristics of any disease or disability will not cause harm to others, including fellow employees and members of the public, through inappropriate actions by the employee.

Employment medicals aim to evaluate an individual’s physical and psychological capacity and provide baseline data to determine:

• If the individual is able to perform the inherent requirements of the job. 
• Any reasonable adjustments that could be made to accommodate. 
• Ways to mitigate harm that may arise to others, equipment or property

Benefits of employment medicals

Whatever the industry, the health and safety of your workforce is key and essential to optimising productivity. Matching the capacity of the individual with the role ensures you:

• Provide a safer work environment
• Reduce workplace injuries
• Minimise downtime
• Reduce WorkCover claims and insurance costs
• Improve productivity and performance
• Reduce recruitment costs
• Meet regulatory requirements
• Reduce organisational risk

Who is getting it right?

Let’s take a look at one of our clients, a large Not-For-Profit organisation with more than 60,000 members and volunteers in Australia. Their thousands of volunteers work hard every day to assist people in need and endeavour to address social injustice.

With diverse operations including personal care and retail, the organisation had a pressing need to resolve challenges concerning their occupational medical assessments including:

• Moving away from paper-based processes, which created delays and inefficiencies
• Quality and consistency concerns when using multiple providers against the same assessment
• Delays in process due to having to obtain further information directly from providers prior to finalising assessments
• Overly burdensome administration

The organisation engaged us to design a bespoke on-line medical assessment solution to address the above challenges. The solution incorporated the following core elements:

• Tailored online medical assessments by role
• Established a real-time portal (MedTrack) to monitor progress from referral to results of assessments
• A bespoke comprehensive online health questionnaire prior to medical assessments.

The solution delivered significant benefits to the organisation including:

• Ability to decentralise the recruitment processes to local regions and continue to have a clear visual over the end to end process
• Significant reduction in administration
• Final statement of results returned within 5 business days of referral
• Improved candidate experience concerning a smooth and effortless process with no delays
• Reduction in number of clinical assessments required (and therefore a cost saving)
• A reduction in preventable injuries of employees participating in this program (however further development time is required to quantify this initial outcome

How we can help

We offer a comprehensive and detailed library of employment medical services, all of which can be tailored to suit your business needs.  These assessments include:

• Pre-placement
• Periodic/Health surveillance
• Compliance/regulatory
• Medico-legal/fit for work
• Drug and alcohol
• Serology/Occupational vaccinations
• COVID-19 health screening and PCR testing
• Functional
• Psychometric

MedTrack is our future-fit software designed to track and manage the health of your employees from pre-employment medicals through to any type of scheduled medical assessment:

• Allows you to request, track and record all activities in a real-time web portal supported by dynamic dashboards and powerful analytical tools. 
• User-friendly and drives process compliance and efficiencies whilst seamlessly integrating with other systems. 
• Adjusted to align to your program requirements and ensure the process of managing your medicals is made as easy as possible. 

DHS offers varying modes of delivery such as online health questionnaires, face-to-face clinical assessments, and virtual care including tele-medicine, virtual reviews, and tele-consults, all of which can apply to any stage of the employment lifecycle.

Roles requiring clinical intervention for assessment are coordinated with our Medical Provider Network (MPN) in the most convenient location at the most suitable time, aligning all assessment elements together to deliver a timely and clear recommendation of fitness to work.

DHS ensures assessments are delivered in the most amenable and least imposing mode possible and work with you to fully customise your employment medical program to key job roles.

Discover how we can help empower your business with our range of innovative solutions.

Fill out the form below to find out how we can help you to take control of your absence management today.