Phoenix Journal · LEV & Air Quality
Extraction that is failing shows up in people before it shows up at the machine - in health surveillance results, sickness patterns and, eventually, a reportable diagnosis. Read those records as a set and they point straight back at the LEV.
Extraction that is not doing its job does not stay hidden for long, but it rarely announces itself at the machine. It shows up first in people, and then in the records kept about them: a health surveillance result that has slipped, a run of respiratory symptoms on a questionnaire, a rise in short absences among a particular crew, a referral to occupational health, or in the worst case a diagnosis reported to the HSE. Read together, those records are the clearest evidence you have that a control is failing, if anyone is looking at them as a set rather than one file at a time.
This is what health surveillance is actually for. The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations require it wherever a substance is linked to an identifiable disease such as asthma or dermatitis, where that disease can be detected early, and where workplace conditions make it likely to appear. For respiratory risk the usual programme is a baseline check soon after exposure begins, then an annual respiratory questionnaire and lung-function test, with the records kept for forty years because these diseases can take decades to declare themselves.
Crucially, surveillance is not there to catch out individuals. It is an alarm on the control. When it flags a problem, the law does not ask you to move the worker and carry on; it asks you to interpret the result and reduce the exposure. A surveillance scheme that never changes anything about the extraction is just record-keeping.
Read the group, not the person
The single most useful thing you can do with health records is read them at group level. One person with a declining lung-function test might have any number of explanations. Several people on the same line, or the same shift, or the same machine, showing the same drift is not coincidence: it is a control failure with a location attached. The HSE's guidance on respiratory surveillance makes the point that results should be interpreted for the exposed group as well as the individual, precisely so that a pattern like this becomes visible.
It helps to keep two kinds of record straight. The confidential clinical detail, the actual medical findings, stays with the occupational health professional and is not yours to see. What you hold is the health record: who is under surveillance, their exposures, the fitness conclusions and any actions taken. That record is factual, it belongs to the business, and it is what an inspector can ask for. Keeping it well, and actually reading the trends in it, is what turns a legal obligation into an early-warning system.
Sickness absence and RIDDOR reports sit at the other end of the same story. A reportable case of occupational asthma is a lagging indicator, the harm already done, and by the time it lands the exposure has been happening for a while. The value of surveillance is that it catches the earlier, quieter signals - the questionnaire symptom, the small drop in spirometry - while the change is still reversible and before a reportable diagnosis becomes inevitable.
Turning records into action
A record only protects people if it triggers something, which is the whole purpose of how to build a health surveillance programme rather than simply commissioning a round of tests. A good programme names a responsible person, gives workers a clear route to report symptoms between checks, and above all closes the loop back to the control: a flagged result should send someone to look at the extraction, not into a filing cabinet. When surveillance data and the LEV are treated as parts of one system, a slipping trend becomes a prompt to test the capture at source, which is the fix, rather than a note that a worker is struggling to cope.
When the pattern names the process
Because trends carry a location, the records often point straight at a specific process before anyone inspects it. A run of respiratory cases clustered around one operation would implicate that operation directly, in the way a group of cases around a solder line would echo the health risks of soldering and electronics assembly, where rosin flux fume sensitises airways and the hood only captures within a hand's breadth of the joint. When health records finger a process like that, the question is no longer whether someone is unwell but whether the extraction on that bench was ever verified to capture the fume at source, and that is a question only a proper examination and test can answer.
Questions
Health surveillance results, respiratory questionnaires, sickness absence patterns, occupational health referrals and RIDDOR reports. Individually each is easy to miss; read together, and at group level, they reveal where and when people are being over-exposed.
Health records must be kept for at least forty years, because the diseases involved can take decades to appear. The confidential clinical detail stays with the occupational health professional, while the factual health record - exposures, fitness conclusions and actions - belongs to the business.
One person's declining lung function has many possible causes. Several people on the same line or machine showing the same drift is a control failure with a location attached. Group-level interpretation turns scattered complaints into evidence about the extraction.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
A slipping surveillance result is often an LEV problem. Phoenix examines and tests LEV to COSHH Regulation 9 and reports on real capture at source. UK-wide.