Accreditation required for occupational health company

[sallyann76]

I have been contacted by an Occ health company to test my staff's hba1c levels if required, does anyone know what accreditations they should hold to be able to do this? I want to check i can trust the company?

 

[Pumper_Sue]

I have been contacted by an Occ health company to test my staff's hba1c levels if required, does anyone know what accreditations they should hold to be able to do this? I want to check i can trust the company?

Why would you want to do that? It's free on the NHS

 

[JJay]

I can't think of any circumstances in which an employer could need or require to know an employee's HbA1C?

 

[Leadinglights]

This does seem inappropriate but it perhaps does depend on what precisely they are offering. A potential data protection issue??
My employer used to arrange for people to have their eyes tested if they wished.

 

[Windy]

I vaguely remember a person posting on here who'd found out he was diabetic at a work medical and he was a train driver, and I've just googled, and pilots need to have theirs checked as part of their ongoing medical checks - page 6 covers the frequency that diabetic pilots need to get it checked.

 

[Deleted member 21371]

I can't think of any circumstances in which an employer could need or require to know an employee's HbA1C?

Quite a few.
Any job with any vaguely hazardous tasks associated with them.
Not so much for yourself, but for protection of others.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Any job with any vaguely hazardous tasks associated with them.
Not so much for yourself, but for protection of others.

Is HbA1c being used in that case as a proxy for the likelihood of hypos? That feels like a bad measure of something you could better get by asking more direct questions (things like "do you have reactive hypoglycaemia", "do you take medication that might cause your blood glucose to go low"), and then you could ask more detailed questions of the minority of employees involved.

 

[Deleted member 21371]

Is HbA1c being used in that case as a proxy for the likelihood of hypos? That feels like a bad measure of something you could better get by asking more direct questions (things like "do you have reactive hypoglycaemia", "do you take medication that might cause your blood glucose to go low"), and then you could ask more detailed questions of the minority of employees involved.

More likely just part of a general health screen.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

More likely just part of a general health screen.

That would make some kind of sense. So a "are you generally healthy" sort of panel of tests. (And then maybe you investigate outliers a bit to check them.)