Drug and alcohol testing for the railway industry

“A Big help”
Oliver Tramwell

Achilles RISQS audited

RISQS (previously known as Link-up) is the UK rail industry audit scheme for suppliers of safety- critical products and services that have achieved successful qualification.

RISQS enables suppliers to go through a single audit process that has been designed and agreed by multiple rail organisations.

AlphaBiolabs is qualified by audit via the Achilles RISQS scheme to provide Network Rail drug and alcohol testing for railway employees:

Why wait for your laboratory confirmations?

We understand how important your drug and alcohol testing policy is to the employees, the business, and all stakeholders involved. However, we also understand the disruption that can be caused if key personnel provide a non-negative sample.

AlphaBiolabs is here to help. That’s why we have developed a rapid testing service to provide laboratory confirmation results, the same day if required.

As you can see we pride ourselves in offering a workplace testing service for the Transport Industry and Haulage Sector which is second to none.

Workplace drug testing methods

Oral fluid drug testing

Oral fluid drug testing is a workplace drug testing method that can be used to determine whether someone is misusing drugs by taking a sample of their saliva and analysing it for particular substances.

An immediate negative result may mean that no further action needs to be taken, but a non-negative result will then undergo confirmation testing from the laboratory to determine exactly what substance was taken and in what quantities.

This form of workplace drug testing can be particularly useful if you do not have anywhere suitably private to collect the sample, if the sample collector is of a different gender to the donor or if a urine sample cannot be provided for any particular reason.

Oral fluid drug testing is known as a ‘narrow window’ form of testing as its period of detection is up to 48 hours, although this can depend on the particular substance taken.

Hair drug testing is a form of workplace drug testing that can be used to support other methods such as oral fluid and urine testing.

It can be particularly useful for a more comprehensive overview of a person’s drug use as it is known as a ‘wide-window’ form of testing, which can determine a history of drug intake for up to 12 months.

In general, hair drug testing is an extremely useful form of testing, and can provide support to workplace testing.

A collected sample can be analysed for drug residue remaining inside hair follicles that have grown above the scalp and this means that the history of intake can be determined when the samples have been collected.

You cannot determine from this form of testing whether a substance was taken during work time as it can be used only to form an average of the amount taken over a certain time.

Furthermore, a person has to have a suitable amount of hair in the first place for a hair drug testing sample to be collected.

We do offer this service as it can be useful in certain circumstances such as pre-employment screening and return to work testing for example, where it may not be important to determine whether their drug misuse was during work hours, but identifying excessive consumption over time or a dependency.