Alcohol addiction today has become a common and very complex issue.
According to recently published data, in 2021, 7.7 million Italians over the age of 11 (accounting for 20 percent of men and 8.7 percent of women) drank enough alcohol to put their health at risk. 3.5 million people drank to get drunk and 750,000 were harmful consumers, that is, those who consumed alcohol causing harm to their health, physically or mentally (source Sole 24ore).
Alcohol abuse before the work shift or during working hours can compromise the Health and Safety of all personnel within the company and that is why the alcohol tests carried out in the workplace are very important: they prevent risks of workers’ injuries by aiming to protect their Safety and Health.
In fact,workplace alcohol testing is part of the company’s Health Surveillance plan and is used to identify whether the worker has had any alcohol intake.
Alcohol testing at work: what is it?
Occupational alcohol testing (or alcohol test) is a test used to check for alcohol dependence of workers who are engaged in activities that could compromise their own health or the health of their colleagues present in the workplace.
Even occasional alcohol intake jeopardizes the worker’s mental and physical requirements.
This means endangering their own and all other employees’ health and safety.
The competent physician, following the health surveillance regulations, is the person in charge of conducting the examinations. If suspicious cases are found at the end of the investigations, he will determine to refer workers to alcohology centers.
Alcohol testing at work and the worker
Affected workers are required to undergoalcohol testing at work to ascertain a possible case of alcohol dependence.
Alcohol testing is performed by the competent physician with a professional breathalyzer in a noninvasive manner and in most cases is done by revealing in the breathed air the presence of ethanol.
Laboratory indicators useful for a verification of alcohol dependence are:
- desialated transferrin (CDT);
- mean corpuscular volume (MCV);
- transaminases (GOT and GPT);
- gamma-glutamyl-transpeptidase (GGT).
Further checks and investigations may also include other clinical examinations designed to assess the worker’s behaviors and physical properties.
Alcohol test positivity
As mentioned earlier, the competent physician if he deems it necessary in the face of strong suspected cases of alcohol dependence delegates the final diagnosis to a specific external laboratory.
Legislative Decree 81/08 (Consolidated Safety Act) states that employers and managers must take into account the health conditions of employees in relation to their health and safety. This means that a worker with an impaired health condition must temporarily suspend his or her job.
Verification of the worker who shows up at the workplace several times with mental and physical impairment can also be dismissed.
A blood alcohol level above 0.3 g/l means that the worker is in a drunken condition.
Some jobs involve a high risk of workplace injury, which is why the law categorically prohibits alcohol intake. Let’s take a quick example:
– employees using cranes, excavators, etc;
– air traffic controllers;
– railway personnel.
These jobs are considered to be potentially at risk of occupational injury, and therefore workers assigned to such work must be subjected to alcohol testing at work on a periodic basis or even by conducting spot checks.
