Sector · Facilities management
Health surveillance for facilities management
Facilities management has an unusual surveillance problem: the employer rarely has its workforce in one place, or even on its own premises. The exposures are real and mostly straightforward, but nobody ever sees the whole population at once, which is exactly what a surveillance cycle assumes.
What you owe
The programmes this work triggers
| Programme | Usually triggered by | Who tends to be in scope |
|---|---|---|
| Skin and dermatitis | Cleaning chemicals, sanitisers, wet work, occlusive gloves | Cleaning teams, washroom services, kitchen and catering support |
| Night-worker assessment | Out-of-hours cleaning, security, overnight maintenance windows | Cleaning crews, security officers, on-call maintenance |
| Respiratory | Cleaning chemical aerosols, dusts during works, some biocides | Cleaning teams, maintenance during refurbishment or planned works |
| Safety-critical medicals | Work at height, plant rooms, confined spaces, driving between sites | Maintenance engineers, mobile technicians, lone workers |
| Audiometry and hearing | Plant rooms, workshops, grounds maintenance equipment | Maintenance engineers, grounds teams |
| Hand-arm vibration | Grounds equipment, power tools, some maintenance work | Grounds maintenance, mobile engineers |
Indicative, not a substitute for your own risk assessment. What you actually owe follows from your measured exposures and your rostering. The surveillance check gives an estimate in about two minutes.
The blind spots
Who gets missed
Surveillance populations are usually built from an obvious list of shop-floor roles. These are the people who fall off it.
- Cleaning staff on client sitesThe largest population, the highest dermatitis risk, and the least visible to the employer. Frequently part-time, often working outside core hours, and rarely present at anything organised centrally.
- Mobile engineersDriving between sites all day, working at height and in plant rooms, and never in one place long enough to attend a clinic. Both a safety-critical and a driving-for-work population.
- Lone and out-of-hours workersOften meet the night-worker definition and are the hardest group to reach with anything requiring attendance.
- TUPE-transferred staffArrive with an exposure history that is somebody else's records, frequently incomplete, and with no baseline that the new employer holds.
Where it fails
The failure mode in this sector
FM fails on reach. Everything else about the surveillance is manageable, since the exposures are well understood and the assessments are mostly questionnaire-led, but the delivery model assumes you can gather people, and this sector cannot. Any process requiring attendance at a place and time will reach the office-based staff and miss the cleaners, which inverts the risk.
The second problem is inheritance. Contracts change hands and staff transfer with them, arriving with an exposure history held by a previous employer in a form nobody can use. Without a baseline of their own, the new employer is carrying an undocumented liability for exposure it did not cause and cannot evidence.
Questions
Common questions
Our staff work on client premises. Whose duty is the surveillance?
Yours, as their employer, in respect of their exposures at work. The client has its own duties for people on its premises, and both can apply at once. What does not happen is the duty transferring to the client because the work is done there.
How do we reach part-time cleaning staff who are never in the office?
By not requiring them to be. Each worker gets their own single-use link and answers on their own device, in their own time. That converts the population that is hardest to reach under a clinic model into the one that completes fastest, because completion no longer depends on attendance.
What do we do about staff who TUPE across with no records?
Establish your own baseline promptly. You cannot inherit what was never documented, and continuing to expose someone with no baseline leaves you unable to show whether any later condition arose on your watch. A questionnaire-led baseline at transfer is quick, and it is the point from which your own record starts.
Start here
See what your sites actually owe
Four questions about your workforce and its exposures, and an estimate of the assessments owed each year by programme. No sign-up, no personal data.