Managing Time with Onsite Drug and Alcohol Testing

When you are implementing onsite drug and alcohol screening, you will need to manage your company’s time around this. After all, your employees will be tested right there at your place of business, and you must have a plan for how you’re going to get it all done in a nice, organized way.

First, compartmentalize your employees into different sections of people. This can be different departments, which may be tested at different times, or it can just be based upon location or the first letter of their last names. When planning for your company’s onsite drug and alcohol testing, organize your employees into groups of twenty or fifty.

Secondly, schedule the testing based upon Mediscreen’s evaluation of time and resources which will be available. You will just call us up and ask us about standard testing procedures, and get the information that you need concerning the size of your place of business, how many of Mediscreen’s employees will be working for your operation, and schedule all of this time in that manner.

Third, make sure that your employees’ records are secure. Since all of their testing records will be stored at your place of business, it is important that access to that database is extremely limited and that your business has a very safe storage plan for keeping them safe and confidential.

Workplace drug testing is easily performed. At Mediscreen, we have been doing it for years, and we love it. Alcohol testing in Australia is so easy now that Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing is available for those who wish to skip the cost and inconvenience of normal laboratory testing. Our methods are safe and effective, and our work is based upon knowing our business well. When you are setting up your drug screening schedule, determine whether or not you wish to make random drug testing a part of your plans, or if you simply wish to go with regularly scheduled testing. Be sure to call Mediscreen up and find out more from our experts who are standing by to answer your questions. In fact, just call us today.

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=1894

Ease of Emotional Strain

Emotional strain is one of the worst feelings to have, and it can create a domino like effect in the world around you. If you are angry with your spouse, then you yell at your assistant, who responds with an attitude, to which you get offended, and then end up taking something personally which was in no way intended to be taken personally.

When you are looking for ways to ease the emotional strain of your employees, remember that prevention and information do wonders for the effect that positive influence can have on your company. Your employees should feel safe from you and whatever temper you may be blessed with, and they should feel safe from each other, no matter who they work with. Workplace Alcohol Drug Testing carries a whole new weight of responsibility for employees who wish to remain employed with your company. We know that sometimes an employee does not really care about sticking around, but for those who do care; it is really helpful to implement measures for their benefit and on their behalf.

Onsite drug and alcohol screening not only evaluates which of your employees may have been abusing illicit substances recently, but it aids in showing your employees that you wish to protect their sense of safety and that you wish to protect their jobs in safekeeping. It shows that you are loyal to your team.

When you end up getting drug & alcohol testing, you will find that even your good employees may mutter a little bit about it, but remember that this is somewhat like a parent doing what is best for their child, even if their child resents it in the short term. It really is about preserving their safety and their jobs. Drug screening is a potent tool to make sure that loyal workers are able to remain with the business for as long as they choose, rather than feeling squeezed out by less qualified workers. Even something as seemingly inane as drug abuse can breed an atmosphere of belief in things not being fair. Continue to treat your employees fairly. Use workplace drug testing in your company today. 

 

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=1885

Belief in Yourself

 Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing

Belief in yourself is an often undervalued trait. People talk about having belief in yourself through cute little inspirational quotes, but often people do not actively teach this trait to each other or learn it themselves. Some people have belief in themselves to a certain degree, but it is always something which can be easily overlooked when times become difficult.

Having self respect and self confidence is a little different. These are views of yourself and your own nature. Having belief in yourself is another matter. It refers to the ability to see your own potential, unaffected and unable to be affected by the actions or opinions of others, and to act on it with fervor and with anticipation.

You remember a time when you were a small child and you were eager to ride your first bike or try out climbing those stairs. It is a feeling of excitement to try something new and to actually believe that you can achieve it if you keep trying. As adults, we have been somewhat programmed to give up if we pursue something that we really want and it does not come to us easily. Here is where the two opinions are kind of muddled together. One is based upon anticipation of learning a new skill or becoming good at a new character trait. The other is based upon going with your gut feeling on matters which are of importance to you.

Drugs and alcohol can rob you of this belief in yourself, and companies which implement onsite drug and alcohol screening are taking a step toward helping their employees to achieve their own personal goals. After all, if an employee cannot do that by working for you, what reason do they have to stay? Drug screening is the step toward building a better future. Drug testing Australia is easy now that Mediscreen is providing onsite testing. Drug alcohol testing is vital to your business being everything that it can be. If your employees are able to experience job development and growth through the use of this preventive and informative measure, then so much the better for everyone. Drug & alcohol testing is strong and effective. To implement alcohol testing in your own company, call Mediscreen today.

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=1879

Trying to Take Responsibility for Others

It is impossible to take responsibility for other people, but many people feel this way if they have grown up with low emotional intelligence. They know that they have an impact on the lives of other people, and since they cannot impact their own lives, they seek to gain control or at least a feeling of control over others. When this happens, they feel temporarily satisfied, but the feeling does not stick. Unfortunately, this is the way that low emotional maturity can be passed down from generation to generation, and from boss to employee. Intolerance and the inability to handle life is one of the crowning achievements of insufficient emotional strength or knowledge.

When you feel yourself wishing to take responsibility for another, or when you feel yourself taking on their own stuff, you are crossing a line. It is reasonable. You have never really been taught where the line is. However, you must learn where it is and you cannot learn where it is by constantly overstepping it or by always being afraid of offending someone.

Fortunately, businesses throughout Australia have company policies, where they delineate appropriate and inappropriate behavior among employees, even with regard to one another. This is an encouraging thought, since it means that you will be able to keep your job without being way too careful and without blowing up in anger at someone else. Part of company policy is implementing workplace drug testing laws where applicable, and just plain old drug screening and your average alcohol testing to fill in the gaps. You see, drug and alcohol testing is part of a widespread movement which is designed to keep company assets within companies, and to keep employee safety around employees. It also protects companies from being sued by their employees if someone is fired and they bring a lawsuit against the business for unfair termination of employment. Onsite drug & alcohol testing can assist in ensuring that your business is fully aware of what is going on, and that you employees are, too.

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=1859

The Psychology of Personal Transformation

Drug Test Perth

        Drug Test Perth

When removing themselves from bad experiences, unhealthy relationships, or dependence upon drugs or alcohol, many people seek to reinvent themselves. They strive to change their appearance, make new friends, change their socio-economic status, move to another location, and change their habits to new ones. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, because old mental habits and old psychological tendencies are still available to the individual when the going gets tough. They really do try to change their world, but there is still some disease left inside of them, and they must literally change their thinking and the chemical composition of their bodies if they hope to win against abuse.

You must be willing to leave your identity behind.

There is a comfort to returning to the old habits, and abusing old systems of behavior when you are afraid of change or things seem to be more stressful than you can handle. When this happens, you must remember that you have control over every part of yourself, including your mental habits and your identity. Changing these things will change you, but it will not erase your memories or parts of you which you desire to keep intact. Rather, it will weed out the musty old toys of your childhood and replace them with new adult tools which you can use to rebuild your life.

Workplace drug testing brings peace of mind to the employer AND to the employee. While many people are good at keeping up their own work ethic, fewer people are as talented at keeping up their own self control while on the jobsite. It is kind of a relief to employees who are on the brink of returning to old abuse to have rules and regulations in place, much like it is comforting to a child to have a strong parent who sticks to their guns during an argument.

Alcohol testing allows you to evaluate employees who are behaving suspiciously and drug screening brings about peace of mind with regard to illicit practices which are much harder to detect. Alcohol and drug testing combined is a powerful and non-emotional ally when a business needs hard facts to work with. For more information about onsite drug & alcohol testing, call Mediscreen today.

The Latest Changes in Web Marketing

Drug Testing  Australia

         Drug Testing  Australia

Web marketing has to do with advertising products and services or building your brand online. This can range to anything, from keeping up your Twitter feed and having conversations with users on Facebook to writing really high quality bogs and articles for your website. Recently, the search engine Google, still the number one site and search engine on the web even today, perfected their algorithms even more, allowing the popular search engine to not only evaluate real (rather than generated) writing online, but to some extent it is now able to evaluate how perfect that writing is. In other words, spun articles and articles with real writing but low quality content are now able to be identified by Google’s algorithms. Algorithms are programming and scanning codes which are highly advanced and which are able to scan entire websites for fresh content, how many people access it and log onto it, and now they are able to see if the content is even written by a human or just randomly generated by a content generator which infuses a nonsense piece with keywords.

At Mediscreen, our onsite drug and alcohol screening services speak for themselves. Our company is a high quality drug screening business which operates in Australia, and we are able to bring clientele to our website through highly evolved repeat business techniques. Our services change and develop and evolve to adapt to our clients needs over time, but our principal existence is based upon quality that is shown throughout our service offerings such as onsite drug and alcohol screening and we provide this service to companies from shore to shore in this great country of ours. In fact, workplace drug testing laws require certain industries, like the mining and aviation industries, to utilize drug and alcohol testing, and we are certainly here to oblige.

As for our marketing procedures, our current clients are the most important thing to us, so we are really dedicated to finding out ways to make onsite drug & alcohol testing in your company safe, cost effective, simple, and efficient. We know that you have work to do. We are simply here to help you do it.

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=1840

Releasing Diseased People From Your Jobsite

Being well adjusted is like gold in your hand these days. So few people are well adjusted and are able to utilize emotional flexibility in their lives that they cannot see what changes need to be made in their lives. They live with disease, they grow disease within themselves, and they choose to hang out with like-minded similarly-diseased people. It becomes a problem that they cannot fix and that they in some way do not wish to fix. The disease of behavior and thinking grows and soon the individual has allowed themselves to be overtaken by it. This is where drug abuse and alcohol abuse come from. They are, in essence, symptoms of this disease. They are symptoms of a pattern where the person cannot see what their problem is, but they very much feel the suffering resulting from this problem.

What is the problem? As always, it is low life experience and low emotional intelligence. In fact, emotional intelligence is the key factor here, since many people who have had “too much” life experience are really not able to handle their own lives. Low emotional intelligence means that you are not able to handle your life, no matter how easy or difficult it might be. High emotional intelligence means that you can handle, quite easily, even the most stressful and pressure filled scenarios without feeling emotional attachment or stress attachment to them.

You cannot fix these people, but you cannot keep them from infesting your jobsite. After all, their inability to handle things can directly affect people around them, raising discontent, and showing other employees how to “de-stress” on the worksite, too. This can affect productivity, clients, etc. So that means that you need a tool, and drug screening is just the right tool to use under this circumstance. In fact, workplace drug testing is perfect for your needs, because it enables you to identify and watched the diseased ones, while also making sure that their behavior does not continue over time. If it does, then you have scientifically documented grounds for dismissal. For more information on Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing , call Mediscreen today.

Standards of Living

We all want a high standard of living, and this means greater income, great net worth, higher savings, understanding and management of money and wealth, and discernment about wealth management. Other people can make haphazard decisions, but your decisions directly affect you. There does seem to be a global goal to make everyone have a high standard of living, but this is not a realistic concept. That is not because there are not enough resources in circulation to accommodate everyone, but because some people can handle positive stable lifestyles and others cannot. If you are emotionally incapable of handling something, it means that you have low emotional intelligence and therefore are unable to grow past a certain point until you get greater emotional intelligence. It means that you are almost physically held back from doing all the things which you know you can do, but for some reason cannot bring yourself to finish. It means that people who would be allowed to have greater wealth and a higher standard of living will throw both of those things away in exchange for being emotionally comfortable in a much lower standard of living. While this may seem sad or unfortunate to some people, living beyond your emotions is so painful that it is far better to live lower than to try to handle something higher.

Standards of living are increased by emotional growth, but this internal growth is thwarted by things like drug abuse and alcohol abuse. This is why school, universities and parents are all so dead set on children and young adults not abusing these substances on their premises. To choose substance abuse is to choose to stop growing inside, or to decay inside. Workplace drug testing laws are primarily in effect for high hazard industries for the same reason. Drug & Alcohol Testing does not have to be harsh or uncomfortable. Drug Alcohol Testing services can really make your staff members feel safe and warm. Even drug testing equipment will be provided by us when we visit your business. For more information about drug and alcohol testing, visit our website or call Mediscreen today.

Bonding, Human-Style

Bonding is something which humans understand on a primal level, and often follow through on using primal urges. However, we live in a first world country with first world and highly civilized upbringings, and not everything primal fits in perfectly with this world. It is important to remember that our ape-natures, so to speak, are in many ways overruled by our higher quality civilized selves. This is not to say that primal instincts are extinct or bad. They are a powerful tool which must be guided and affected by our more civilized selves, or as you may put it, our more refined selves. We all start out as primal when we are children, and it is only with life experience and personal development that this refinement occurs.

You may notice that the more drunk or high a person is, the more they return to this primal state, either in society or in their personal affectations. Even if they were born high class and lived a life of quiet and controlled refinement, their brains being out of control can be extremely coercive and powerful to their inner refinement. All of this is to say that employees who abuse drugs or alcohol are more likely to end up with callus and low quality forms of expression, which can drive away clients and make poorer judgment calls regarding company equipment and machinery. Drug screening can identify this problem and give you control over their working environment. Workplace Drug Testing can help you quickly identify a potential danger to other employees and fix the problem right away, especially since your company is liable for any accident that your employee causes on the way home from inebriated work.

Onsite drug & alcohol testing is meant to create a safe working environment where your employees do not have to be afraid of what they say or do, and can exert creative control over their working environment. These are the employees who you actually would desire to be in charge of creative control. Alcohol drug testing is meant to help these people remain in a position of exerting this control. Drug screening is a helpful leveraging tool, and leveraged knowledge is extremely powerful.

You Are Truly In Control

When you run your business, whether your do so with an iron fist or a light suggestive manner, you are the one who is in control. While this may sound trite and a little blunt, the truth is that perception control the world around us. If we believe ourselves to be weak, then it is so. If we believe ourselves incapable of commitment and hard work and steadiness of pace, then it is so. Our belief in ourselves is part of what makes us who we are. It is important to be able to separate yourself from the opinions of others, not because other people don’t matter, but because you must be able to stand on your own, as far as how you think of yourself. Of course you must be professional, and of course it matters how you appear to others, but their opinion of you must be separate from your opinion of yourself. This is absolutely a must, so that you can differentiate between the two.

The moment that you become unable to differentiate between your opinion and theirs is the moment that you lose control over your own perspective and how you think about things.

So how do you get in control if you are not or feel that you are not? You get it through information, knowledge, and more information. Without these things, you cannot hope to have even enough knowledge experience, not to mention life experience, to understand your own motivations and reasons for doing things, must less those of your subordinates. You are, indeed, truly in control.

The more information you possess and absorb, the better you will be able to separate the opinions of yourself and others. This is necessary in order to establish a solid baseline for your identity and for your leadership in a group.

Workplace drug testing laws are the state’s method of bringing this about, to a small extent. Many companies use Drug & Alcohol Testing, even if they do not have to, in order to acquire information on their employees and therefore be able to make reasonable assumptions regarding their performance. Mediscreen provides Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing, and we take pride in our drug screening methods.

The More Failure, The More Success

Yes, we’ve all heard it before, “You cannot succeed until you fail many times.” Well, that is truly depressing when you start out with a great idea and want it to succeed on the first try. After all, you certainly wouldn’t want to PLAN failure, would you?Indeed. You might want to plan failure.

Failure itself is not bad. It is like doing an experiment. You try to mix various chemicals together and you see what happens. Listing something as a success or as a failure is somewhat counterproductive. After all, if you are randomly mixing chemicals together in your laboratory experiment and you make observations in your notebook about what is going on, none of the experiments can be a failure. They are merely observations. Why can’t failure be seen as this on other things in life? Why can’t people view failure as something to observe and examine and take note of and pay attention to? After all, there is not any difference between observing a failure and observing a success. The study of each provides information as to the cause of different attitudes and sources of the failures and the successes. One cannot really bring subjectivity to the surface, can they?

Oh, but it is difficult to fail at something and to not have an emotional reactive thought about it. It is very difficult to be able to judge something when your reason and logic are on vacation. How do you get from negative emotional reactions to the ability to see failure as something which should be observed objectively like your success?

The answer is: practice. When you are learning how to play the piano, you will not get better without lots and lots of practice. Over and over again, you must practice failing and reacting to failure appropriately to gradually begin to control your emotions. Then, you can do anything.

Workplace drug testing is a fairly successful operation. You do not find many mistakes in protocol, even if it is an onsite drug and alcohol screening operation. Workplace drug testing laws only bring so much stability, and you have to bring the rest, through regular alcohol testing and drug screening. For more information regarding Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing.

Re-forging Relationships

Relationships are delicate plants which need to be loved and nurtured and fed. Without proper care, they become hard and inflexible. Just like living tissue, relationships need proper nutrition and cellular flexibility and the ability to effectively throw off waste products. Without these properties of living tissue, relationships can become hard and stressful and detrimental and even poisonous. It is necessary for the growing individual to gain wisdom and life experience in developing and maintaining relationships, and to continue this learning process throughout their lives.

If you cannot continue this process of growth in your relationships, then you may find yourself becoming increasingly incompetent at maintaining your current relationships with anyone, and this can result in not having any friends or close buddies. This is an example of using a muscle, or losing it. You must use it or lose it.

Re-forging broken relationships is another battle entirely. It is on a whole new level of difficulty. Not only are you trying to replace old, more destructive habits, but you have all of these emotional ties to the person, all of which makes reason and common sense rarely seen. Fortunately, having a stable work environment can build these relationships more easily and more effectively. It is like having a safe environment in which to experiment about what you would or would not do for yourself and your loved ones. At work, there is a certain amount of leeway or human error that is allowed. This corresponds to the work to be done and the skill required to do it. Individuals with the most responsibility really have the most leeway and therefore can take on extra “experimentation” points.

Part of safety in the workplace is drug and alcohol testing, and some workplace drug testing laws in Australiaeven require that entire industries regularly schedule employee drug testing. Mediscreen provides onsite drug and alcohol testing services to any company in Australia, and we are particularly proud of our mobile services. Onsite drug and alcohol screening is so much more convenient than regular conventional methods. We would love to answer any questions which you may have about how to better protect your company throughout your business career.

Quality vs. Quantity Time

Quality time is especially defined by personal enjoyment of the time spent on something or with someone. Quality does not, in perfectly logical terms, have to involve deep meaningful conversation. It can be simply bonding together over sex or enjoying a football game together. Quality time becomes very subjective between two partners or between business associates who are trying to make a deal. In fact, the very definition of a power breakfast or power lunch is that in which everyone gets the highest quality for the time spent in discussion.

So, in the business, world, what are the real differences between quality and quantity time? The purpose of quantity time, how much time you spend in association with a partner or company, will affect how solid their reputation is over a certain period of time. If their products or services show consistency or value and if their company shows stability and good management, this is an indication of their quality. Their quality measurement increases as this consistency and value persists.

This means that the quality-quantity ratio has very real interconnections and that you cannot really separate the two. Whenever the question of either arises, your first question should be, “Are we being consistent?” After consistency is evaluated and found to be even, then you can move on to the safety of your staff, then the efficiency of your operations, and end with the quality of your end product or service.

In other words, even the quality is affected by deeper roots and attitudes. In order to keep these attitudes straight and parallel, you may need to implement or step up your workplace drug testing. Employees should feel as if they are working in a safe, secure environment, and this is especially true in high hazard industries. Protocol absolutely must be followed. Investment absolutely must be made. Your employees are the life blood of your company, and their safety equals the safety of your company. Drug screening, particularly onsite drug and alcohol screening, really creates a framework within which to build a good solid set of safety rules.

Drug Abuse in Aviation

Aviation lends itself to getting away with a lot, especially if you travel for your job. Abuse is less noticed, and substance abuse can easily be covered up, since not everyone with whom you work will be able to discern unnatural or inconsistent behavior in you. In aviation, you can get away with a lot more illicit behavior if you travel for your career. However, this will not always be the case, since you can easily have drug and alcohol testing leveraged at you. Employee drug and alcohol screening is especially important to implement in high hazard industries such as aviation, because in many high hazard industries, drug and alcohol testing is a requirement. Mediscreen simply makes the whole process so much easier by offering onsite drug and alcohol screening. Onsite testing means that you are tested and evaluated at your place of work, and then any suspicious samples are taken by to the lab for further examination. It is really as simple as that.

There are other dangers to drug abuse at high altitudes than just the effects which can occur at normal altitudes. Your body may be affected in specific ways, such as respiratory function, ability to maintain balance and coordination in a moving aircraft, and the ability to hold down food and liquids. Also, your sense of coordination and reality may be really affected by mixing higher concentrations of oxygen with your drug of choice. There are many ways of going about experiencing this process. None of them are safe, and anyone who is in control of passengers’ safety will easily find themselves putting many lives in danger from this practice. This does not just include the pilot, but anyone who works on or in or outside of the aircraft. Regular maintenance and testing are part of passenger safety, too.

Mediscreen provides onsite drug and alcohol testing for companies all over Australia. We love our job, and we love what we are able to do for the environment. Our testing procedures are cleaner, simpler, more cost effective, and more time efficient. We believe in getting it right the first time.

Deep in Denial

Denial is a very dangerous place to be in. Denial can mask the truth and can mask signs of danger or of trouble up ahead. It can warp perception as bad as any alcohol, and it can create a desire for escape, just as much as any drug withdrawal. Denial can be deadly. Denial can breed fear.

In the workplace environment, you must be able to see and accept truth and reality. Not doing so can cost you your job, your income, your perception, your promotion, your successful relationships, and your own peace of mind. Often, sniveling groveling doormat employees who are in denial about the responsibilities which they should be taking pride in find themselves with very little peace of mind. Denial can rob you of your peace. Employees who are overly aggressive or domineering may tell themselves that they are keeping their environment efficient and making more money for the company, when in fact they are intimidating and frightening other employees. Denial can create hatred, bitterness, and resentment in otherwise productive environments.

Unfortunately, substance abuse can increase denial in anyone. One of the reasons why employees are tested for drugs and alcohol is that they can fall deeper into denial and believe things which they know in their hearts to not be true, and vice versa. Denial can not only destroy employee-employer relationships, but it can greatly affect coworker relationships. Taking personal responsibility for your actions is something that nobody really wants to do, but it makes your world a lot more tolerable.

Denial is a disease, but it is a disease of the psyche. One cannot exactly go to a pharmacy and obtain a drug prescription for it. This is why it is so important to understand it and fight it off as soon as it appears. The ability to engage with reality is the hallmark of some of the best employees.

Drug screening is necessary in order to help keep denial at bay. Drug and alcohol testing is quite effective in treating denial, depression, and the inability to cope. How is it a treatment? Onsite drug and alcohol screening can be instrumental in helping you take personal responsibility for your life.

Alcohol testing: Safety in Travel

Many companies are franchises or they have multiple offices all over a country or area. When this is the case, executives must travel from location to location, seeing to matters of importance and making sure that managers and subordinates are doing their jobs in the best possible way. Also, there is a need to update information and modus operandi in order to stay competitive with other businesses which are in the same industry…or even in the same area.

When your executives and other levels of employees are traveling from place to place, it is important to make sure that there is a certain amount of consistency in what they encounter. A business is built by reputation and it is necessary to keep each location operating by a certain standard. Workplace drug testing helps to keep the employees and the level of quality of their work at a minimum standard which you can set. It is the ability of someone in your position to take the clay and mold it a little. Each branch of the company does not have to be cookie cutter identical to all the rest, but it certainly helps to have a minimum standard of quality. When you are implementing drug alcohol testing for your business, remember to take into account differences in areas, populations, number of employees, and potentially dangerous neighborhoods, all of which may contribute to how often you decide to have each franchise tested. While the work itself may be the same, the surrounding neighborhoods and therefore the surrounding influences are very different.

When any of your employees are traveling, they should find a safe haven in other branches of your company. They should find something recognizable. Workplace drug testing helps to eliminate the potential for disparity between employees in different areas. It helps to maintain consistency, and consistency is one thing which many growing businesses have difficulty in maintaining.

Onsite drug and alcohol screening is not just reserved for questionable individuals. It is a standard practice, used by many companies to make sure that their employees are safe and that their assets are protected. 

Onsite Drug & Alcohol Testing: Time or Money

You will either spend time or money when you are interacting with the consumer market or investing in the business market. Time will save you money, and money will save you time. It is rare that you will find a situation in which both money and time can be saved. Onsite drug & alcohol testing services will save you time, because you will not be spending it on scheduling laboratory drug testing for your employees and your employees will not have to take time off of work or take personal time of their own in order to travel to the laboratory to become tested. Laboratory testing will cost your employees either way, and can cost both you and your employees money if they have to take time off of work to get this done.


Mediscreen saves you money by providing onsite drug and alcohol screening services to all businesses all over Australia. Whether you are a small business with just a few employees or a large company with hundreds of employees, they will need to be tested, and Mediscreen offers competitive pricing on our services when we come to your jobsite. Mediscreen is focused on providing the best drug screening services at the best prices and at the best location: your own workplace. This means that you do not have to leave the office or the jobsite in order to be tested, you can save money on the operation because you are not paying for time away from work and you are not paying laboratory expenses, and it is convenient and effective for your employees.


If you have to spend time or money on something, which would you choose? You can save money by spending more time on a project, but your time is valuable, especially if you have a family waiting at home for you or friends with whom you spend your free time. You can save time by spending more money, but this cuts into company savings and emergency funds, and can deprive your employees of expected income for a week, income which provides for their homes and food and families, too. With Mediscreen, you have both time and money at your disposal, not to mention effectively tested employees working for you.

Returning to Work after a Move

Whether an employee is transferred to your division or they have just moved in to the area and have begun working for you, it is a good idea to understand (or remember) the mechanics of moving and how this affects their working relationships. For example, if someone is only seeking temporary employment until they find a better job or receive a better position within your company, they may forget that a strongly positive reference from a local employer may help them both in the short run and in the long run.

Employee drug & alcohol testing is for a specific purpose: to determine which of your employees may be showing up to work under the influence of alcohol or illicit drugs and to provide legal documentation of how many instances where this has been tested positive. There are many reasons why an employee may be moving and not all of them are pure causes. Not only is it a good idea to double check references from newly arrived employees, but it is a good idea establish what their reputation is in an interview when they first arrive or apply for the job. On the one hand, you want to give newcomers a warm welcome to your area and help make them feel at home and loved and appreciated. On the other hand, you want to make sure that your generosity is not being put forth in vain and that your newly acquired resources are right for their job position.

Unfortunately, employees who have a negative track record with drugs or alcohol may move simply to get a new start, but not necessarily to change their previous behavior. Even with the best of intentions, out of town arrivals are still often stressed out and overwhelmed by the process and enormous responsibility of moving, and their best laid plans may not be enough to keep them from returning to their former behavior. After all, it may be the only thing that is familiar to them when they arrive in their new place. This is why alcohol drug testing and job histories are so important to make sure that new arrivals are up to snuff. 

The High Cost of Not Doing Workplace Alcohol and Drug Testing

There is no arguing the fact that workplace drug testing can be controversial as people raise privacy issues. Should the employer be able to figure out that an employee used cannabis 2 days ago? Is it fair to force people to submit to an alcohol or drug test when they prefer not to? Clearly, more and more employers and government agencies are instituting random drug test programs because they believe the answer to these questions is “yes”. Even more court cases are being settled in favour of employers enforcing testing of employees for substance use to ensure workplace safety, and state and territory laws are becoming more supportive of testing for a variety of employee groups. For employers, the real issue is the high cost associated with not doing alcohol drug testing in the workplace.

Recently it was reported in the Lancet medical journal that Australia and New Zealand populations have the highest rate of cannabis usage at 10 to 15 percent and the highest usage rate of other drugs like speed and crystal methamphetamine at 2.8 percent. Professor Wayne Hall with the University of Queensland’s Centre for Clinical Research was quoted as saying, “Among the most common harms were drug dependence, overdose deaths, accidents, violence, HIV-AIDS and other blood borne infections.

Testing Costs Are Low Compared to Costs of Not Testing

Each one of these harms and a lot of others can directly impact an employer’s bottom line. Many discussions about workplace drug testing focus on managing the direct costs like the cost of testing equipment or the labour cost of program administration. However, the low cost of today’s effective drug testing equipment and certified laboratory testing can be dwarfed by the cost of not testing and not knowing the status of substance use and abuse in the workplace.

• Estimates gleaned from Australian and USA studies indicate alcohol may contribute to approximately 5 percent of work related fatalities

• When sued in court, an employer without an alcohol and drug testing program can be found in breach of the general duty, required by law to provide a safe workplace, if someone is injured due to the use of alcohol or drugs by co-workers

• Worker turnover leads to high tangible and intangible costs associated with employee replacement that include the costs of recruiting and training, and the loss of the exiting employee’s skills, training, knowledge, expertise; empirical data indicates that lost productivity accounts for two-thirds of total turnover costs

• Cost of reduced job performance by substance abuser requiring co-workers to either re-do work or fill in for employee using alcohol or drugs

• Cost of lost productivity through job withdrawal behaviours like taking long lunch breaks, sneaking extra breaks, spending time on non work related activities and sleeping on the job

A 2008 report on the costs of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug use identified quantifiable tangible costs for households, businesses and the government. The following statistics for 2004/2005 were reported for businesses:

Costs of lower productivity in the workplace due to alcohol consumption is estimated to be at least $3.6 billion due to alcohol and $1.6 billion due to illicit drugs

• Costs of absenteeism as those who drink alcohol are 1.2 times more likely to be absent from work compared to those who don’t drink

• Employees are 3 times more likely to be injured leading to increased workers’ compensation and disability claims

• Health insurance and workers’ compensation costs soar due to increased medical and hospital expenses of $192 million related to drugs and alcohol

• Vehicle accidents lead to workplace disruption costs plus associated legal, vehicle and insurance expenses costing businesses $576 million

• Increased workplace criminal activity like theft costing over $1.4 billion

The total annual tangible costs to business associated with alcohol misuse were over $5.6 billion. The costs for illicit drug abuse were $3.2 billion. However, it is impossible to measure the full costs of alcohol and drug use in the workplace. For example, how do you measure the real cost of an employee trying to work under the additional stress of completing job duties with a co-worker who is under the influence of a substance?

The cost of employee alcohol and illicit substance use in the workplace runs into the billions of dollars each year. The cost of not instituting alcohol and drug testing is simply too expensive to forego. Mediscreen at offers high quality flexible Onsite drug and alcohol screening services that can help you contain the potentially high cost of employee substance abuse.