HEALTH AND SANITATION
29
Keeping contractors safe
Whether you are a contractor, project manager or homeowner
with sub-contractors working under you, there is a certain level of
responsibility.
By Dr Doug Potter
If you have been working with these
employees for years, then you can start to
guess if one of your workers is impaired, but
what do you do?
The first fact we need to know is fatigue kills more
people than drugs and alcohol combined, so if we
are not testing for fatigue, we are missing half the
problem. We need to be using the right tool for the
right job.
When I was in medical training one of the doctors
took us on rounds to see patients. He held up two old
style mercury thermometers, one a little bigger and
thicker than the other. He then asked the group if they
knew the difference between a rectal thermometer
and an oral thermometer. When none of us answered
the patient replied, “The taste.” We could see the
patient was upset but it drove into my head that day
to always use the right tools for the job.
The right tools
Recently in South Africa as well as the US and Ireland
they have legalised cannabis products and that is
something that we are all forced to manage. There
are over 30 medications, both over-the-counter and
prescribed, that will make you show up positive for a
drug test and even something as innocent as a poppy
seed muffin will show up positive. We need to manage
the safety of the employee as well as letting the
managers know we are not putting our customers or
them at risk. This lets us work the guys safely and not
have to retrain a host of employees for false positives
and avoid a potential class action lawsuit later for
unlawful dismissal.
It is my belief that in the future you will see these safety
tablets everywhere and they will be as common as cell
phones or laptops. I am now 55 and if you told me 35
years ago that there would be a mobile device that you
could carry (cell phones) that had artificial intelligence
that could talk back to you, I would think you had lost
your mind. So, the future of alertness testing using
applications like the Alertmeter to keep our jobsites safer,
is not that far-fetched. PA
Dr Douglas Potter is
director of Predictive
Safety South Africa. He was
voted among the top 10
doctors in fatigue in 2012
and headed the team that
built Africa’s first Fatigue
Centre. The team has won
seven international awards
on fatigue — two of these
awards are Gold Quills.
With regards to alertness testing, the best test on the
market is the Alertmeter. It has been tested and trialled
through a grant at the Department of Transportation
in the US and is presently used in South Africa, North
America and South America at over 200 sites. It is a
60 to 90 second test done on a tablet or smartphone
that lets you know what your fatigue/ alertness level is.
October 2019 Volume 25 I Number 8
If you fall a little below your baseline,
countermeasures are suggested like drinking coffee,
stretching or cold water on the face. There is a list
of 20 levels, dependent on your fatigue level. The
reason I like the new alertness testing is that it is
non-invasive. If I ask an employee at a job site to
take a drug test or single them out to pee in a cup
or take a blood test for alcohol, they will feel slightly
violated and perhaps even upset. The opposite is true
for alertness testing as it gives the impression that
you care. If workers take a 60-second test before
they enter the jobsite, the manager or foreman will
know who tested low. We tell those managers to tell
those employees they would like to have a safety
conversation with them. Questions are asked about
the amount of sleep they’ve had and if they feel tired
or fatigued. It is then up to that supervisor to give that
person a countermeasure to keep them fresh, or in an
extreme case of fatigue to send them for a medical to
help them find out why they are fatigued.
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