6. Act on the results of health surveillance

When your health surveillance is concluded, you must get feedback from the occupational health professional who carried it out. Until you have received this feedback your health surveillance is not complete.

Feedback should include advice on fitness for task with the relevant exposure(s) and when further health surveillance is required for each worker undergoing health surveillance. You should enter this information into the individual health records that you must keep.

You must act on the results to protect workers where health surveillance shows they have work-related ill health. If further investigation is required, this should be done in a timely manner in discussion with the occupational health professional.

For example, if an occupational health professional advises you that a worker is not fit for a task, consider assigning the worker to alternative work where there is either restricted or no risk from further exposure.

You must also review your risk assessment and control measures to prevent other workers developing work-related ill health.

Where possible, review your feedback from health surveillance for groups of similarly exposed workers, or those involved in similar tasks. This can help provide a clearer view of how effective your controls are for each source of health risk. When doing this, groups of workers should be big enough to protect individual worker’s anonymity and prevent disclosure of confidential medical information.

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Updated 2021-11-08