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Showing posts with the label AS4308-2008

Make sure you’ve got a Drug Testing Policy in place

Drug testing employees? Make sure you’ve got a policy in place John Salter / Thursday, April 6, 2017 SmartCompany You suspect one of your staff members is regularly turning up to work affected by their drug intake. Or there’s been an incident at work, and an investigation has uncovered that the staff member involved was impaired by alcohol at the time. What do you do? For many SMEs, their initial reaction will be to discipline and perhaps dismiss the employee. But before you go ahead and make any rash decisions, you need to understand exactly where you stand legally if you want to minimise the chance that an unfair dismissal or other relevant claim is brought against you. The case of the Sydney ferry driver One of the most notorious unfair dismissal cases in Australia involving drug and alcohol use was that of a Sydney ferry captain who tested positive to cannabis in 2013, after being called in to work on a day off to cover an unexpected absen

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample and sacked drug-tested sergeant Eamonn Duff  March 12 2017  A single strand of hair that destroyed the life of a long-serving Sydney police officer has the potential to influence the future of not just the entire NSW Police Force but all workplaces across NSW. Sergeant George Zisopoulos insists he has been wrongly dismissed due to one of his hair follicles which returned a positive drug test reading. But while the state's top cop, Commissioner Andrew Scipione, has determined that, on the "balance of probabilities", the officer knowingly consumed drugs, scientific opinion suggests otherwise. Leading forensic experts have cast doubts over the decision to sack Sergeant Zisopoulos, concluding there is "no evidence" the substances found on his hair were ingested and that the minute readings may have been caused by "external contamination". ergeant Zisopoulos, who is the first NSW

Changes to Australian Standard AS4308:2008

The updated AS4308-2008 Standard has made fundamental changes in sample collection and Laboratory confirmation testing. Here are some of the key points: Summary: The standard requires collectors to have completed a nationally accredited course in drug screen collection and/or onsite testing. What is evident is that clients performing their own collections will need to have their staff sign off if they wish to collect samples and/or do onsite tests in accordance with Section 2 of the new standard. The standard and NATA also requires laboratories to state unequivocally on the report the status of collections and their compliance to Section 2 Where a collection is not performed by a registered WDP collector the following will appear on the WDP report. ‘This sample has not been collected by a registered WDP collector. Cannot be verified compliant with AS4308:2008Section 2’. The New Collection Procedure The changes to collection are to do with the mandatory splitting of samp