By Glenn Dobson, CEO, The Drug Detection Agency

Don’t cut costs or corners when it comes to health, safety and hiring. It’s a mistake I’m seeing around the nation, and its effects can be significant in terms of injury, penalties, and legal fees.

The infrastructure industry is under pressure and staring down the ongoing labour shortage, a technical recession, rising population levels, and rebuilding from natural disasters. Private and public operators understand the urgency to futureproof the country and correct historical underinvestment in infrastructure. And it’s hard to keep up while keeping costs down. A great solution is pre-employment and regular substance testing.

We all know that hiring and retaining the right staff is critical for business sustainability, and believe me when I say this it’s no different in our industry. Workplace substance testing is a risk management tool that aims to remove drugs and related harms from the workplace. Stopping pre-employment testing, regular testing or using noncompliant DIY testing not only causes long-term damage to a company’s finances, culture and reputation, but it also creates a potential health and safety risk in the workplace. As substance use, and the availability of dangerous substances, is rising, it is even more critical to not trim health and safety spending.

Pre-employment testing is your best tool in the due diligence process for hiring workers, along with the interview process, reference checking, and criminal or driver history checks. It indicates to prospective employees that your drug and alcohol policy is part of an active commitment to maintaining a productive and healthy workforce, reinforcing a safe wellness-based culture within your company.

A greater variety of dangerous substances, like opioids and other synthetic analogues, are appearing in testing results across Australia and New Zealand. Some of these substances (including medicinal cannabis products) are hard to detect or distinguish with ‘off the shelf’ testing kits.

Using an experienced accredited tester for all testing should be non-negotiable. Accredited testers follow internationally recognised and ethical processes that avoid contamination and tampering. They have relationships with reliable drug testing laboratories that analyse samples with high reliability, and get results back efficiently. They deliver compliance, and a level of accuracy that withstands legal scrutiny. Bad results, both false positives and negatives, can lead to undesirable consequences, turning away or letting go good employees, or allowing habitual substance users in.

Here are The Drug Detection Agency’s top five recommendations:

• Invest in the long-term health, wellness and safety of workers to protect your business and its reputation.
• Have a strong, clear, professionally made and well-communicated substance-use policy. If you have one already, make sure it’s relevant for today.
• Use pre-employment testing that identifies habitual substance users before they enter your workforce.
• Use accredited testers to increase compliance and accuracy, producing results that can reliably inform business decision-making.
• Be aware of the increasing availability and use of opioids, medicinal cannabis products and other dangerous substances, and engage your teams to ensure they are up to date with these trends and the problems they can cause.