Workplace Alcohol Testing

The impact of alco­holism and drug depen­dence in the work­place often focus­es on four major issues:

• Pre­ma­ture death/fatal acci­dents
• Injuries/accident rates
• Absenteeism/extra sick leave
• Loss of pro­duc­tion

Alcohol Testing

Two spe­cif­ic kinds of drink­ing behav­ior sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tribute to the lev­el of work per­for­mance prob­lems: drink­ing right before or dur­ing work­ing hours (includ­ing drink­ing at lunch and at com­pa­ny func­tions), and heavy drink­ing the night before that caus­es hang­overs dur­ing work the next day.

Types of Testing Available

USAMDT of North­east Ohio offers two types of alco­hol test­ing:

1. Breath alco­hol test­ing
2. Oral flu­ids (sali­va) test­ing

Breath alco­hol test­ing mea­sures the Blood Alco­hol Con­tent (BAC) that may be present in a person’s sys­tem. Using a breath­a­lyz­er that con­forms to DOT stan­dards, an ini­tial screen­ing test is con­duct­ed. If the BAC is above the company’s lim­it for alco­hol, the tech­ni­cian will wait fif­teen min­utes and con­duct a sec­ond con­fir­ma­tion test. The fif­teen-minute wait­ing peri­od will elim­i­nate the pres­ence of mouth­wash, for exam­ple, as that alco­hol will dis­si­pate dur­ing the wait­ing peri­od. This is an extreme­ly accu­rate process for mea­sur­ing the BAC, and all USAMDT Breath Alco­hol Tech­ni­cians (BAT’s) are trained and cer­ti­fied to DOT stan­dards through Life­loc.

If a breath­a­lyz­er is not avail­able, a quick alco­hol sali­va test can also be con­duct­ed for screen­ing pur­pos­es. If the pres­ence of alco­hol exists, the sali­va test should be fol­lowed up with a breath­a­lyz­er for con­fir­ma­tion (and is absolute­ly required by the DOT).

Final­ly, alco­hol can be detect­ed in a urine alco­hol test. The dif­fer­ence with this type of drug screen­ing test (referred to as ETG) is that this may show that alco­hol had been con­sumed pre­vi­ous­ly (up to a few days), and does not nec­es­sar­i­ly reflect cur­rent use or impair­ment. There­fore, this alco­hol drug screen test­ing is rec­om­mend­ed for court or pro­ba­tion­ary test­ing, where com­plete absti­nence is required.

Some facts about alco­hol in the work­place:

• Work­ers with alco­hol prob­lems were 2.7 times more like­ly than work­ers with­out drink­ing prob­lems to have injury-relat­ed absences.
• A hos­pi­tal emer­gency depart­ment study showed that 35 per­cent of patients with an occu­pa­tion­al injury were at-risk drinkers.
• Analy­ses of work­place fatal­i­ties showed that at least 11% of the vic­tims had been drink­ing.
• Large fed­er­al sur­veys show that 24% of work­ers report drink­ing dur­ing the work­day at least once in the past year.
• One-fifth of work­ers and man­agers across a wide range of indus­tries and com­pa­ny sizes report­ed that a coworker’s on- or off-the-job drink­ing jeop­ar­dized their own pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and safe­ty.