Introduction Employees are exposed to occupational health hazards and are in need of medical surveillance to prevent ill health. Organisations carry out health risk assessments and these help anticipate the presence of health hazards. Hygiene surveys then confirm their presence and magnitude. Depending on the level of exposure, there is need to monitor and ensure adequacy of control measures in preventing ill health. This is done through medical surveillance programmes. It is not practical for Line Managers to memorise these programmes and comply with requirements. As a result, an automated web based system was developed to manage this.

Methods A system was developed to manage occupational health in a company with 120 employees. Consultations were done in the following departments to confirm occupational health roles and responsibilities: HR, SHEQ and Occupational Medicine. These departments had specific functions defined in the system.

Results 100% of employees were covered in the medical surveillance programmes and all were monitored on time. The system automatically tracked compliance of each employee and sent reminders to the employee, line manager or both at a predefined time. Medical records were kept for ever as compared to a defined number of years. Reports were automatically generated for the various user groups. None compliance was escalated automatically to senior management. Doctors had access to soft copy medical history, relevant records and occupational hazards per patient.

Conclusion The database was named OcHSol, meaning Occupational Health Solution. This system comprehensively manages occupational health. When using this system, employees are no longer missed for risk based medical surveillance. The database manages pre-employment, periodic, pre-placement, post incident and exit medical examinations.