Random drug and alcohol screening is used by many UK companies to deter the use or abuse of illegal drugs and / or alcohol by employees within the workplace. There have been a large number of case studies to demonstrate how effective random screening is in reducing accidents, absenteeism, ill health, litigation, etc, and as a result it is frequently considered to be best practice, especially in safety critical environments.
Even when a business doesn’t introduce full random drug testing, they often choose to conduct testing when there is a problem – such as incident or accident based screening or “for cause” testing when there are sufficient grounds to suspect that an employee is not fit to perform their duties due to drink or illegal drugs.
How often random drug and alcohol testing should be carried out can be determined by the business based upon a number of factors. Such factors include the nature of the business, demographics of their staff or factors relating to the culture of the business – for example, a culture of lunchtime drinking.
Some companies carry out as little as 5 percent random testing (i.e. only 5% of staff are drug tested just once per year after being randomly selected), whereas other businesses may insist that every employee is screened at least once annually or more. It really depends upon the cost, certain health and safety considerations and their own drive to enforce a drug and alcohol free workplace.
Substance abuse screening in the workplace is relatively straight forward to implement and can be put into place without much expense when done correctly. Random testing of company employees can be carried out on-site for less than