Pre-Employment Medical Assessments
Protect your employees and your business by mandating pre-employment medical assessments.
It is increasingly common in the Australian workplace to ask for a pre-employment medical assessment from a qualified physiotherapist. When a job has physical demands, a pre-employment assessment can demonstrate whether or not a potential employee is well suited to the task.
It is important that the pre-work assessment is tailored specifically to the job requirements. By customising the test to the specific needs of the job, employers can rest easy in the knowledge that relevant injury risks have been identified. It’s a great way of ensuring employer safety, increasing productivity and avoiding the nightmare scenarios of workplace accidents and compensation costs.
During a pre-employment medical assessment, the prospective employee undergoes a physical examination, including tests that are related to functioning in the required job. A detailed medical history is also compiled, with an in-depth medical questionnaire to establish fitness for the job.
Other factors that might be documented in a pre-employment medical assessment, if they are deemed relevant to the job are:
- Height
- Weight
- Blood pressure
- BMI
- Functional assessments
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What are the functional assessments and what role do they play in a pre-employment medical assessment?
- Range of motion
- Joint integrity
- Balance and strength
- Cardiovascular fitness
- Push and pull
- Flexibility, endurance and postural tolerance
- Hand grip strength
- Movement technique and quality
- Bending
- Lifting
- Reaching
- Squatting
- Stairs and ladders
What are the risks of not carrying out pre-employment medical assessments?
- If the wrong person is hired for a physical job, the outcome can be disastrous: injury, death, lawsuits, and complicated workcover claims. A pre employment can keep employees, candidates, businesses and budgets safe, by stopping accidents before they even have a chance to happen.