Radiation Medicals & Health Reviews (COVID19)

Background

The UK government has provided advice regarding radiation medicals and health reviews required by the Ionising Radiations Regulations 2017 (IRR17). When an employee is designated as a classified person in the UK they will require a radiation medical by an appointed doctor before that designation is made. Follow this, at a period not exceeding 12 months, that person requires a health review, also conducted by an appointed doctor. It is expected that the initial medical is conducted face-2-face, whereas the health review may be face-2-face but could be carried out remotely, depending on the type of radiation work being undertaken by the employer.

Government advice

The advice (for IRR17) in full reads as follows:

For routine medical surveillance of classified persons under IRR, the appointed doctor can conduct a paper review. For high risk radiation workers such as industrial radiographers, or those classified persons at the end of the five-year cycle where a face to face review is planned, they can carry out a telephone consultation and review the dose records and sickness absence records. If there are no problems, a follow up face to face review can be scheduled three months later. Where there is a problem, a judgement can then be made on whether to see the worker face to face and, if so, how to do so safely.

You can read the full article (which also deals with similar matters for other areas of health and safety legislation) at the following link: Performing health/medical surveillance: coronavirus (COVID-19)

Ionactive RPA comment

HSE are likely to be flexible at this difficult time. We have examples where clients cannot even obtain a telephone consultation with an appointed doctor due to their resources being diverted to Covid-19. Our advice is to keep good records of the attempt to secure a review, the date where another attempt will be made, an internal review of the employees dose record and current work with ionising radiation. This should be conducted with the RPA (which can be done remotely).

[For historic reasons this page and links still remain, however as of January 2023, the UK has moved on considerably with respect to Covid 19].