Sector · Logistics and warehousing
Health surveillance for logistics and warehousing
Logistics owes fewer programmes than manufacturing but across far larger populations, and the two that dominate, night-worker assessments and safety-critical fitness for plant, are the two most often absent entirely. The problem is scale and churn, not clinical difficulty.
What you owe
The programmes this work triggers
| Programme | Usually triggered by | Who tends to be in scope |
|---|---|---|
| Night-worker assessment | Night trunking, twilight shifts, continuous fulfilment operations | Drivers, pickers, loaders, shift management, on-site security |
| Safety-critical medicals | Forklifts, reach trucks, PPTs, MEWPs, driving for work | Truck operators, drivers, anyone on mechanical handling equipment |
| Audiometry and hearing | Automated sortation, conveyors, chutes, loading bays | Sortation and loading staff in older or high-throughput facilities |
| Skin and dermatitis | Handling, packaging, glove use, cleaning chemicals | Pickers and packers with heavy handling, cleaning teams |
| Respiratory | Dust from handling, exhaust in enclosed loading areas | Loading bay staff where LPG or diesel plant runs indoors |
| Hand-arm vibration | Some maintenance and workshop tools | Engineering and fleet maintenance |
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.
- The agency workforceIn many operations agency staff are a large share of the shift and do the identical job. The duty follows control of the work rather than the contract, and this is the sector where the assumption that the agency handles it is most widespread and least true.
- Occasional plant usersThe warehouse supervisor who is licensed and jumps on a truck when the line backs up. Licensed to operate, so exposed to the fitness question, but not on the operator list.
- Drivers on the night trunkRarely at the site when anything is organised, and among the highest-risk groups for both night work and safety-critical fitness.
- On-site security and cleaning contractorsMeet the night-worker definition comfortably, and are usually a different contract nobody has mapped.
Where it fails
The failure mode in this sector
Logistics fails on scale. The programmes are simple, the populations are enormous, and turnover is fast enough that a manual process is out of date before it finishes. An operation with fifteen hundred people across four sites, most on nights and several hundred licensed on plant, is not going to close that with a spreadsheet and good intentions.
The second failure is ownership. Night-worker assessments look like a working-time matter to safety teams and a health matter to HR, so they sit between the two and never get run. Safety-critical fitness is often checked once at induction and never again, even for operators who have been with you for a decade, which is exactly the population whose fitness is most likely to have changed.
Questions
Common questions
Are agency workers our responsibility for health surveillance?
Generally yes, where you control the work. Duties broadly follow control rather than the contract of employment, so agency staff exposed on your site are usually in scope for you, whatever the agency does separately. It is worth confirming what the agency actually provides rather than assuming, because in our experience of this sector the answer is often less than the client believes.
How often should forklift operators be medically assessed?
HSE guidance for rider-operated lift trucks recommends assessment on appointment and periodically after, and it is common practice to increase frequency with age. There is no single statutory interval, so the defensible position is a written policy setting out your intervals and your reasoning, plus reassessment triggered by illness, a new diagnosis or a medication change. See safety-critical medicals.
We have 1,200 night workers. Is assessing all of them realistic?
Yes, because the routine assessment is questionnaire-led rather than a clinic appointment. Each worker answers on their own device, most complete without clinical involvement, and a clinician's time goes to the minority whose answers warrant it. That is precisely the shape of problem the platform exists for.
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.