Fitness to work

Abstract

Personnel involved in incident response can be put under significant amounts of physical, thermal and emotional stress and it is unrealistic to expect them to perform either individually or as a team without proper pre assessment on real time monitoring during the incident. In this paper we will look at a well tested programme for a commercial and multi national HAZMAT incident response team that has responded to over 30 Incidents in the region over the last 12 months and how it works in practice for the permanent members of the team and also how it can be modified to be used with third party contractors to ensure that their health and safety is not compromised. The paper will cover • Medical Assessment • Benchmarking • Surveillance monitoring • In field practices • Fitness testing and programmes Field results will be presented and used to demonstrate the difference that having an effective programme can make Please note that the authors are operational personnel with a total of over 30 years of experience in this field and the paper is targeted at operational and HSE personnel rather than medical practitioners. Copyright 2008 Society of Petroleum Engineers.