Sector · Manufacturing and engineering
Health surveillance for manufacturing and engineering
Precision engineering, fabrication, foundries and general manufacturing carry the heaviest surveillance burden per head of any sector. It is common to owe four or more programmes on a single site, and equally common to be running one of them properly.
What you owe
The programmes this work triggers
| Programme | Usually triggered by | Who tends to be in scope |
|---|---|---|
| Audiometry and hearing | Presses, grinders, hammers, compressed air, machine halls | Machine operators, fabricators, fitters, anyone on the shop floor for a full shift |
| Hand-arm vibration | Grinders, impact wrenches, needle guns, sanders, chipping hammers | Fettlers, fabricators, maintenance fitters, finishers |
| Respiratory | Welding fume, metalworking fluid mist, solvent vapour, dusts | Welders, machinists, paint and coating operators, anyone near a weld bay |
| Skin and dermatitis | Metalworking fluids, solvents, degreasers, extended glove use | Machinists, assembly, cleaning and maintenance |
| Night-worker assessment | Two and three-shift rotation, continuous process running | Anyone whose rota regularly includes nights, including supervisors |
| Safety-critical medicals | Forklifts, overhead cranes, mobile plant, working at height | Truck and crane operators, maintenance working at height |
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.
- Maintenance and engineeringThey move across the whole site and pick up every exposure on it, often at higher intensity than production staff, but they sit outside the production role map the surveillance list was built from.
- The occasional welderSomeone who welds for two hours a fortnight is exposed to welding fume, which HSE treats as carcinogenic regardless of duration. Intermittent exposure is invisible to a list keyed on job title.
- Supervisors and team leadersFrequently on the floor for most of the shift and often covering machines at short notice, but classified as management and therefore off the exposed list.
- Quality and inspectionIn and out of the machine hall all day. Noise exposure is about accumulated time, and their accumulated time is often higher than they assume.
- Agency and labour-supply workersDoing the identical job to employees in scope. The duty follows control of the work, and the agency's own arrangements rarely cover it.
Where it fails
The failure mode in this sector
Manufacturing rarely fails on clinical quality. It fails on population and cadence: the list of who is in scope was built accurately two years ago and has not been re-derived since, so it now reflects a workforce that has moved on. People have transferred, processes have changed, and a proportion of the list is people who left.
The second failure is more damaging at audit. Because several programmes run at once, coverage is usually tracked per programme in separate places: audiometry with the OH provider, HAVS on a spreadsheet, the night-worker assessments nowhere at all. Nobody can produce a single answer to "what proportion of your exposed workforce is in date", which is the question an inspector actually asks.
Questions
Common questions
We are a 250-person engineering firm. Roughly how many assessments is that a year?
It depends entirely on how many people are exposed and to how many agents, which is why we do not quote before a scope call. As a shape rather than a number: exposed staff frequently trigger more than one programme each, so the annual assessment count for an exposure-heavy site is usually a substantial multiple of the exposed headcount rather than equal to it. The surveillance check produces an estimate for your own numbers in about two minutes.
Our OH provider does audiometry once a year on site. Is that enough?
It covers one programme for whoever attends on the day. The questions that remain are who was in scope and did not attend, whether the other programmes your exposures trigger are running at all, and whether you can evidence any of it eighteen months later. A clinic day is a delivery mechanism, not a compliance system.
Does welding fume surveillance apply if we only weld occasionally?
Very likely. HSE treats all welding fume, including from mild steel, as carcinogenic and expects effective control for indoor welding regardless of duration. Occasional welders are exposed welders, and they are the group most often absent from the surveillance list. See respiratory surveillance.
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.