Posted By Joe Fenoughty My wife works for Royal Mail. She had an injury to her shoulder which led to 9 months of sick leave 7 years ago, while working for Royal Mail. She has for the past 7 years delivered Mail with the use of a golf type trolley. Should Royal Mail have provided Health Surveillance in those 7 years?

Posted By Tim Although some people do a form of surveillance for MSD's, there is to my knowledge no legal requirement to provide it.

Posted By Tim Ray, I did say it is conducted but not a legal requirement, if you look on the HSE website under health surveillance you will see the following statement: MSDs and stress There are health risks (eg stress; musculoskeletal disorders) for which the law doesn’t require employers to provide formal health surveillance. This is because valid techniques don’t yet exist to detect the symptoms of these diseases. However, it is still be good practice to monitor health using other arrangements, such as symptom reporting and sickness absence records. Regards

Posted By steve e ashton Raymond: From http://www.hse.gov.uk/co...thrisks/surveillance.htm "Formal health surveillance is only necessary if work damages health in a particular way and the following three factors all apply: there is a valid way to detect a disease or condition; and it is reasonably likely that damage to health will occur under the particular conditions at work; and health surveillance is likely to benefit the employee." I know its not construction but the basic principals are the same... Personally, in this case I can see no 'valid way to detect' that wouldn't be picked up by self-reporting of symptoms as identified in Tims reference Neither can I see any 'benefit' for the employee - there is unlikely to be additional mitigation or treatment that could be applied to avoid further damage once (further) symptoms are identified (other than removal from exposure which probably measn dismissal)... It may have been wise for the employer, knowing the history, to consider more frequent refresher training (although see recent thread regarding the dubious 'benefit' of this) and to re-emphasise to the individual worker that they should report any further problem but - in my opinion- Health survellance would probably not have been of any use here, and would not have been seen as 'necessary'... Steve

Posted By Joe Fenoughty Hi everybody I would first like to thank all of you for contributing to my question. There seems to be some ambiguity about my question, so I am going to clear up a few of the issues. My wife began work for Royal Mail as a PostLady in January 1998 with no physical problems what so ever. Problems with her shoulder began in December 2000 which caused her to be away from work for 9 months. Should the Royal Mail be responsible for the Health Surveillance or should there be any Health Surveillance at all. My wife is still a postlady but she has a trolley instead of a sack to carry her mail in.

Posted By Tim Joe, What I would have expected to happen, is that occupational health would have assessed her, then some recommendations to management about what she was able to do, and how the risk of the condition progressing further could be managed, something should have come out of this process, i.e use a trolley etc or if duies could not be performed, then some form of redeployment. All the best

Posted By Jean Hi Joe I've sent you an email Jean