Periodical Medical Examination

Hi all,

The periodical medical examination is one of the most important activities of occupational health services after the employee joins the organization and utmost importance must be given for this key activity.

It serves many purposes;

1. For early detection of occupational diseases and deviation in the health of employees.

2. To find out the prevalence and incidence of occupational diseases

3. Trend analysis of health reports helps in identifying the cause of occupational diseases and thereby helps in framing recommendation to initiate preventive measures. Prevention may be at primary secondary or tertiary level.

4. Occupational health physician gets a chance to meet each and every employee in the organization. This meeting can be used for imparting health education and creating awareness about occupational diseases and its prevention at the individual level.

5. To measure the outcome of implemented programmes to protect and promote employee health.

6. As a part of complying with statutory requirement as per Karnataka factory rules 1969 88-L and Indian factories act 1948 41-C

Choosing tests, frequency and employee group

1. Hazardous substances and processes must be identified and studied in detail before selecting investigations to be done for the employees.

2. Thus identified tests must be conducted for all the employees in the organization irrespective of their exposure to risk. This will help in deciding whether the identified risk is causing occupational diseases or an occupational disease is caused by specific risk in doubt. If it is not possible to conduct all the tests for all employees in the organization, a fair number of control group must be used.

3. The periodical medical examination is to be conducted once in six months for employees working in hazardous factories and once in a year in case of nonhazardous factories as per Karnataka factory’s rules 1969 88-L. Hazardous factories are defined in schedule 2 of Indian factories act 1948. Examinations may have to be conducted at more frequent intervals if the occupational health physician feels so.

Thus obtained medical data is put into the analysis to find out the health status of employees and for framing recommendations to prevent occupational diseases if any.