Privacy in health and safety: part III

Exposure and Health Monitoring

What are the rules around health testing? This much is clear: under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 and its regulations, businesses have an overarching primary duty to ensure (“so far as is reasonable”) the health and safety of workers. This includes monitoring workplace conditions so as to prevent any injury or illness arising from work.

Now we venture into greyer areas. For some employers, this will mean that regular health monitoring is necessary. This might also involve exposure monitoring. The regulations around this are set out here (Part 3, Section 32 and 33-42). But which employers, which workers and which environments?

WorkSafe has some good advice on this here. Those who do monitor their employees’ health and/or well-being should also consider how the test results are stored. This is explained in part three, section 42 of the General Risk and Workplace Management Regulations, accessible here.

If you’re not quite sure about whether you need to be monitoring your staff’s health, or whether your records are sufficiently secure, we suggest you call WorkSafe on 0800 030 040 (24 hours). If you’d like a discussion in advance, email and we’ll get back to you.