4. Understand your business needs

Health surveillance

As an employer, you should have an ongoing health surveillance scheme if:

  • an identifiable disease or health effect may be linked to the exposure at work
  • it is likely that the disease or health effect may occur under the particular conditions of the work
  • there are valid techniques for detecting signs of the disease or effect
  • the technique is low risk to workers

Valid techniques are those that are precise enough to detect something wrong that could be caused by exposure to a health risk; and which are safe and practicable to conduct.

Health surveillance is a legal requirement in specific circumstances when there is still some residual risk to worker’s health despite the control measures you may have put in place, and they are likely to be exposed to:

Health surveillance is used to identify occupational diseases, such as:

Medical surveillance

As defined in certain regulations, you must use medical surveillance where there could be exposure to certain high hazard substances or agents. A doctor appointed by HSE must do the medical surveillance, except for some lower risk asbestos work.

This includes work with:

Is this page useful?

Updated 2021-11-08