Alcohol Misuse at Work - Are the Existing Services Able to Cope?.
Salter's Psychiatric Review defines alcohol misuse as drinking intermittently or persistently to such an extent that it interferes with an employees health or performance (efficiency, productivity, safety or attendance) at work. This is the definition that will be used in this report, which will examine the effects of alcohol misuse in the workplace and the extent of the problem. Alcohol misuse in any environment is known to cause health problems, most notably it can lead to liver damage (e.g. cirrhosis), as well as problems with other systems of the body. However, in the workplace it causes the added problem of a derogatory effect on the economy and risk to employee health. It is thought that 1 in 5 accidents, and over 50% of fatal accidents in the workplace are alcohol related and over 8 million working days are lost from inappropriate drinking of alcohol1. In financial terms it has been calculated that the cost of sickness absence due to alcohol consumption was £779m in 1989 and the cost to the National Health Service (NHS) was estimated to be £120million2. A discussion with the project tutor revealed that research has shown that alcohol misuse has a total cost to industry of approximately £780 million (Dornan 2001)3.
A number of methods can be used to identify harmful and hazardous drinkers. Firstly there are behavioural and physical signs. The signs of a suspicious drinker are paranoid attitudes, depression and frequent car accidents as well as the early physical signs of chronic gastritis and nocturnal sweats. The next signs are those of a probable drinker, which include excuses from work, frequent references to alcohol and the odour of alcohol on the breath. The signs of certain alcohol misuse are blatant indiscriminate use of alcohol, high consumption and withdrawal symptoms on stopping4. This evidence on its own may not be very reliable and so may be disputed by the employee.
Introduction In present world, Health safety issues are the supreme conscious of the people because of different kinds of diseases and environmental pollution and food adulteration. Hence most of the organizations in the globe take adequate health and safety policies and procedures. The actual situa...
