Safety Knights

First off, be cautious on post-incident testing, as OSHA has some fairly strict guidelines on when you can and can't administer post-incident testing.

If you're talking DOT-covered employees, they have specific regulations, such as to stop trying to test for alcohol 8 hours after the incident, and stop testing for drugs/controlled substances after 32 hours have elapsed since the incident. With that being said, if testing is warranted (or required by DOT or other regulatory agencies), I always document why I couldn't send them in the alloted time frame (e.g., employee refused to provide a sample, employee quit and never came back, employee was admitted to the hospital, etc.).

You CAN screen them a day (or more) later, but realistically speaking, the alcohol will already be out of their system, and if they wanted to detox, they could detox and clean out their system and pass an ordinary UA drug screen. Hair follicle tests and other methods can be more accurate, though.

Regardless, if you're not testing immediately after the incident (or within an hour or two), it's going to be extremely hard to determine if the drugs and/or alcohol were truly a causal factor in the incident and not be subject to a potential discrimination case. You can enforce a "zero tolerance" policy, but if you're testing to determine if it was a causal factor in an incident, then any testing performed 4 or more hours after the incident will be fairly useless in most cases.

I am as much a HR person as OHS person. 15 years ago Post-Accident Drug Testing was a BIG thing. We did it all the time! Most companies in my area had it all set-up with the local ER Departments that if an employee even mentioned a work-related injury or condition a drug test was mandatory, automatic. Once in a great while I might call the ER when we sent an employee to the ER and tell them to skip the drug test. In these cases I was 100% drugs or alcohol were not factors. Once I really thought about it, but got busy and it did not get to it in time. As it turned out the employee had a high level of marijuana in there system. We had 0 Tolerance so for drugs so we terminated the employee even though the drug had nothing to do with the accident (the employee was merely standing when a hoist support fell on him). I never called after that.

In any case about the time I retired, 5 years ago, from the Corp and left HR our Corporate Employment Attorneys and our external consultants (Ogletree - Dawkins) advised us to cease automatic drug testing for EEO and OFCCP reasons as they felt they might be discriminatory. So we did. I am still active in SHRM and from what I understand automatic post accident drug testing is no longer in vogue. In fact it is now considered "old-school". Most HR people would give you a hard "No" on the practice today.

However if there is "just cause" drug tests are a good thing! Drew makes good points on the timeliness of the test, so I would keep that in mind.

I will throw a slight monkey wrench into all this. If you are dealing with a CDL licensed employee and the injury occurred from a DOT recordable accident (I usually recommend googling a decision tree for determining whether or not a accident is considered a DOT recordable which is not necessarily dependent on if the employee is injured but has to meet certain criteria) then there are certain cut off times. Drug tests cannot be performed after 32 hours of the accident and alcohol tests after 8 hours. Should they not be completed by these times then it must be documented as to why it was not.

I'm guessing that in the situation you laid out above it was not due to a dot recordable accident but I wanted to throw that out there incase anyone was not aware of those rules. When it comes to OSHA versus DOT/FMCSA I generally am more familiar with the latter due to most of my background was spent in the transportation realm.