Maintenance & systems
LEV records and health surveillance are two halves of the same defence. Your test reports, logbook and check records show exposure was controlled; the health record - which under COSHH must be kept for at least forty years - shows the people were monitored. Together they are what proves you did right by the workforce, and did it lawfully.
The short answer
LEV records and health surveillance are two halves of the same defence. Your test reports, logbook and check records show exposure was controlled; the health record - which under COSHH must be kept for at least forty years - shows the people were monitored. Together they are what proves you did right by the workforce, and did it lawfully.
The detail
Health surveillance and LEV documentation answer two different questions about the same workforce. Health surveillance - the questionnaires, lung-function tests, skin checks and, for some substances, medical examinations required under COSHH Regulation 11 - asks whether the people are staying well. Your LEV records - the thorough examination reports, the logbook, the daily and weekly checks - ask whether the control that keeps them well is actually working. Neither is complete without the other.
The link runs both ways. If health surveillance ever detects an early adverse effect, the first question is whether exposure was being controlled - and your LEV reports and logbook are the evidence that answers it. Equally, well-kept LEV records showing steady capture are only fully persuasive alongside surveillance showing the people exposed were being monitored. Documenting LEV use is, in part, documenting the exposure history that gives health surveillance its meaning.
Retention is where the two diverge sharply, and it catches people out. LEV examination and test records must be kept for at least five years under COSHH. Health surveillance records must be kept for at least forty years from the date of the last entry, because occupational lung and other diseases can take decades to appear. Original design and commissioning information for the equipment should be kept for its whole life. Filing all three on a five-year rota loses the records that matter most, long before they are needed.
Good documentation therefore captures more than pass or fail. It records who worked with what, where the control was and how it performed over time, so that if a question is ever asked - by an inspector, an insurer, a solicitor or a doctor - the exposure history can be reconstructed. That history is impossible to recreate after the fact, which is exactly why it has to be built as you go.
What it means for you
Kept properly, the pair is a powerful defence. Should a claim or an enforcement question arise years later, an employer who can produce contemporaneous LEV reports, a filled-in logbook and a retained health record can show both that exposure was controlled and that the workforce was monitored. An employer who cannot is left arguing from silence, which rarely ends well.
It also protects the worker, which is the point. Health surveillance exists to catch harm early enough to act on - to move someone away from an exposure, to review the control, to prevent the next case. That early action depends on the records being there, kept for the decades over which these diseases develop, and tied to a clear picture of what the person was exposed to.
The practical task is modest: keep the LEV reports and logbook current, keep health records under the forty-year rule rather than the five-year one, and store the equipment's design information for its life. Done consistently, it turns two separate compliance chores into a single, coherent account of a workforce that was both protected and watched - which is what the law, and fairness, actually ask for.
The service behind the guide
Sibling guides
How new machinery changes your LEV obligations · Where face-fit testing and RPE fit in · An HSE notice versus a test
Questions
LEV records show the control was working; health surveillance shows the people were monitored. If surveillance finds an early effect, the LEV records are the evidence of whether exposure was controlled.
At least forty years from the date of the last entry, under COSHH, because many occupational diseases take decades to appear. This is far longer than the five-year rule for LEV test records.
At least five years under COSHH. The equipment's original design and commissioning information should be kept for the whole life of the system, not just five years.
Because it cannot be recreated later. If an inspector, insurer, solicitor or doctor asks what someone was exposed to and how it was controlled, only contemporaneous records can answer.
Employees exposed to substances linked to an identifiable disease where valid detection techniques exist, or those on the substances and processes listed in COSHH Schedule 6. It is carried out by a qualified occupational health professional.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
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