Agriculture & Abattior Medicals
In many agricultural and abattoir jobs, occupational health medicals are required even before workers start their employment. The stringent regulations stem from valid concerns over safety in the entire food chain, because illness and disease can have dreadful ramifications on both a domestic and global scale.
Strict occupational health and safety regulations apply throughout the agricultural industry, from poultry and wine farms to abattoirs. Many diseases must be reported to the relevant authorities, because the health and safety risks are so many and potentially so far-reaching.
Beyond the abattoir, farm workers involved in the farming of animal products or field crops face many occupational health hazards. These include:
- Being exposed to animals that can transmit diseases such as avian flu, ringworm and bovine tuberculosis.
- Grain dust exposure in silos, which can lead to respiratory illnesses such as asthma and allergies.
- Pesticide exposure, which affects handlers, harvesters and anyone working near a recently sprayed field.
- Muscoskeletal injuries because of repetitive or forceful movement, heavy lifting, prolonged awkward postures and vibration.
- Hearing loss because of noise exposure
(think tractors, harvesters, chainsaws, squealing pigs). - Heat or cold stress from working long hours in extreme temperatures.
This means employees must take their workers’ health and safety medicals very seriously. In abattoirs, for example, any worker who handles chicken or red meat must be medically certified fit to work prior to entering the workplace. This requirement falls under a legally mandated hygiene management programme (HMP) that every abattoir owner must implement.
It focuses on both the personal hygiene and medical fitness of workers, since either can have a profound impact on food health and safety. Abattoir owners must keep documentary proof of their adherence to the HMP, including workers’ medical certification that they were fit to work with meat and edible products prior to their employments.
It is clear that farm and abattoir workers, depending on their risk exposure, could require pre-employment, periodical/annual as well as exit medicals. These should entail a full medical examination with biological monitoring. Certain vaccinations, lung function tests and chest X-rays may also be required.
The following chart shows the test are done for each category:
Training
Services
Well-trained employees are safe employees
Your construction site is only as safe as the employees working for you – and often they are working alone, without your oversight. They need to know what to do when an unexpected event occurs in order to manage the most rapid response possible and minimise risk exposure, injuries and even deaths.
We can help you with your safety training programme either on-site or at our head office in Midrand, where we have classrooms as well as scaffolding to train employees working on heights. This division aims to take the burden of compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act away from you so that you can focus on your core functions.
Our training is certified by the Health & Welfare Seta and the Construction Seta. We specialise in:
- Working on heights Scaffold erecting and inspection
- First aid level 1
- Health and safety representative
- Hazard identification and risk assessment
- Basic fire-fighting
Safety Files
We will open and manage your contractor health and safety files for you, ensuring all documentation required in terms of the Occupational Health and Safety Act as well as the Construction Regulations are properly kept and maintained.
Risk Assessments
We will conduct a complete audit to assess your compliance with all aspects of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. This includes a general facility safety inspection of aspects such as storage, lighting, air handling, sanitation, hazardous products, emergency equipment, and so forth. We also develop safety plans as well as fall protection plans. In addition, we offer contractor management to ensure that contractors working on your premises are in compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act. This ensures that their activities do not place you at risk of non-compliance.
Incident Investigation
We can investigate all incidents in the workplace and help you to develop and implement action plans to prevent them happening again.