Testing takeaways from Health & Wellbeing at Work 2019

Cansford Labs was among the 3,500 delegates at this year’s Health & Wellbeing at Work show, which gathered public and private organisations to examine and explore the future of occupational wellbeing, at Birmingham’s NEC.

It was – as ever – a packed show, with plenty of opportunities to meet new faces and better understand the context for our drug and alcohol workplace testing services.

Having weaved their way through presentations on disaster preparedness, workplace gamification and sleeping on the job, we asked three of our team - Marketing Director Alex Swann, Business Development Executive Frank Bellwood and Managing Director John Wicks -   for their key takeaways from the show. Here’s what they told us.

Insight #1:  Workplace wellbeing is increasingly valuable and important to employers

“Most exciting is the evolution of the workplace health & wellbeing industry over the past 20 years. Wellbeing wasn’t even a conversation two decades ago: in 2019, this conference covered everything from musculoskeletal treatments to sleep workshops and stress management. It’s great to see this focus on work/life balance, acknowledging the huge impact, both positive and negative, that health and wellness in the workplace can have. And it’s great to see investment pouring into the area, despite the UK’s ongoing economic worries.

“Companies are seeing a considerable return on their investment in the sector – something that has become easier to evaluate in the last few years. The future of workplace wellbeing looks increasingly interesting and multi-faceted as a result, and improved employee drug and alcohol testing is set to play a crucial role in the evolution of the sector.”

– Alex Swann, Marketing Director

Insight #2:  Interest in pre-employment hair testing is growing

“The employers we spoke to are increasingly dissatisfied with point-of-care tests for drugs and alcohol in the workplace. Once you put the full picture to somebody, the case for pre-employment hair testing becomes much clearer.

“Point-of-care tests – usually urine tests – only provide a narrow window of detection of up to seven days, and can provide ‘false positive’ and ‘false negative’ results that must be corroborated by secondary laboratory testing. Candidates can cheat the tests by abstaining from drug or alcohol use in the period before the test, or by tampering with their sample. In this way, employers struggle to build a true picture of candidates’ substance use before employing them.

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“Hair testing, on the other hand, offers a much wider window of detection of up to 12 months. Hair tests are highly accurate and virtually impossible to cheat.

“At Cansford, we offer test results within three days of sample receipt, with 85% of our results posted within 48 hours. Employers, therefore, have fewer reasons to use point-of-care tests for pre-employment testing, when the alternative is faster, more accurate and tougher to cheat.”

– Frank Bellwood, Business Development Executive

Insight #3:  Employers are still dependant on urine testing, to their cost

“Point-of-care tests are still used by many employers in situations where they suspect an employee is drunk or under the influence of alcohol, or where their recent drug or alcohol use is affecting their ability to work safely.

“Many of the employers we spoke to use urine samples for point-of-care testing, when they would be better advised to use oral fluid (saliva) testing.

“Urine tests are very easy to cheat. Also problematic is the fact that a positive urine test must be corroborated by a laboratory test. This makes the whole testing process much longer. An employer may choose to suspend their employee on full pay while they do a secondary saliva test. They could choose to take a saliva sample in the first instance, instead, which we can process within 3 days. The time that they’re forced to suspend someone on full pay is therefore vastly reduced. Time-cost isn’t the only issue here. Fairness is at stake, too.

“Urine testing only indicates the presence of drugs in the system – not the exact type of drug. An employee may test positive for the use of opiates and be suspended for weeks. But that opiate might be from a codeine-based medicine that the employee was using to manage back pain, for example. Their suspension will, therefore, be unfair for everyone involved. Sending a saliva sample to a laboratory in the first instance will cut their suspension down to days, not weeks.

“One final thing: a urine point-of-care test can only detect a limited range of drugs, whereas laboratory testing can screen a much wider mix. This is particularly significant when it comes to NPS – New Psychoactive Substances - something we discussed with many delegates at the show.

Employers that are concerned that their employees are using new types of drugs should, therefore, choose laboratory testing, not point-of-care testing, as a matter of course.”

– John Wicks, Managing Director

Education around pre-employment and employment testing still has a long way to go, and our laboratory team is on hand to answer questions you might have about detecting drug and alcohol use in your team. The good news is that this year’s show proved the important, recognised role that workplace testing plays as part of the occupational health mix – keeping employees safer, everywhere.

See you at next year’s conference!

Found this article interesting? Learn more about pre-employment testing for white collar roles

Featured image from http://www.healthwellbeingwork.co.uk/.