Pre-Employment Medical Examination

Hi all,

Every employee must undergo a pre-employment medical examination before joining the organization, as it serves two very important purposes namely,

1. To place the right man for the right job

2. Baseline medical data collected during the pre-employment medical examination will be compared to the data obtained during his stay in the organization for early detection of deviation from health.

Physical examination and battery of investigations are performed to assure the right man for the right job. Ideally, assessing fitness should be inclusive in nature rather than exclusion. While deciding a candidate’s fitness for a job, two factors are taken into consideration:

1. Long-term view – To protect employees from acquiring occupational diseases during their long-term stay in the organization.

2. Short-term view – To ensure the safety of the employee from day one after he joins the organization.

Many organizations give much importance to short-term view and completely neglect the long term view, thereby resulting in exposing the employees to various occupational diseases, which may prove fatal for employees, great financial burden and productivity loss for the organization.

Hazards existing at workplace needs to be identified and working environment is to be assessed by an occupational health physician to decide the nature of investigations to be conducted to assess the fitness of the desired candidate for that job.

Number and nature of tests will vary according to the working environment, work nature and the candidate himself.

Thus the identified tests will serve as a basis for screening purposes.

Screening a candidate will give three different outcomes while deciding a candidate’s fitness

• Fit: Those who are through with the screening tests and physical examination will be considered fit for the ‘particular’ job.

• Temporary unfit: Those who are not able to clear screening medical examination and tests are referred to a concerned specialist for further evaluation and a detailed report is obtained regarding a medical diagnosis, underlying pathology, and its severity. Based on the report, if the occupational health physician feels a candidate has a reversible medical condition which may be cured on its own or by medical intervention, he considers the candidate in temporary unfit state and reviews the candidate after a stipulated time or upon completion of treatment of the medical condition. If the candidate is already indulged in work, he may be asked to refrain from work even before the specialist opinion is taken, if the occupational health specialist feels so.

• Unfit: certificate for a particular job will be issued, if the occupational health physician feels that, the candidate or co-workers will be at risk if the candidate is allowed to work because of his prevailing medical condition. An occupational health physician is empowered to issue an unfit certificate or seek a specialist opinion. If the candidate is already indulged in work, he may be asked to refrain from work even before the specialist opinion is taken if the occupational health physician feels so.

The Concept of screening in pre-employment medical examination

Pre-employment medical examination basically screens the population for a specific job from the general population, so the nature of examinations and investigations should be more sensitive than specific. So the result of filtered out candidates may contain false positive but filtered in candidate should never be a false negative. Screening tests should be chosen in such a way that, it should ensure efficient filtering out the “not-so-fit” candidates rather than letting in the “may-be-fit” candidates. And filtered out candidates from screening tests are subjected to further investigations and specialist opinion, to justify or to nullify the decision of making him unfit for the job.