Thanks to Bob Vetter for "vetting" an important issue in the Safety First column" "Medical Fitness is not something you can (or should) evaluate: Tuesday, 23 Jul 2013 ( #626 ).

In the USA, there are laws intended to protect operators from unfair employment practices. Mr. Vetter describes a vantage point that is both useful and proper for trainer/evaluators to adopt and apply. Perform as Mr. Vetter states in the article and you will never be criticized for performing your operator evaluation in a way that is unfair to a person with an apparent or perceived medical condition that you personally do not have or want.

Assuming that your evaluation is based in valid and objective evidence of operator behavior required on-the-job, you will do well and good to stick with the objective measures and ignore any actual or perceived medical conditions (EXCEPT for OBVIOUS and rare conditions such as a pregnant women who might have to be evaluated on how to activate the emergency reverse of a motorized hand truck by pushing her torso or hip against the large button at the end of the tiller; or the person who arrives for their evaluation with profuse bleeding. You gotta use your head on the obvious and thankfully, rare, exceptions!).

However concise and well done Mr. Vetter's writing on Medical conditions during evaluation, this begs a discussion on operator evaluation, the quality of them, and whether the normal practices in the field are helping or hindering the safety and productivity of operators on-the-job. Are the actual practices simply a pretense for regulatory compliance?

In the USA, the OSHA-required operator evaluation, as written into the regulations at 29 CFR 1910. 178 (l), is sufficiently abstract enough to allow an employer to determine the thoroughness and precision by which the evaluation is conducted. Few perform evaluations that have been validated in accord with existing professional standards. Most evaluate the operator in mostly a subjective way, with little-to-NO objective criteria; relying on "forklift instructors" whose "evaluation" methods, when examined closely, offer employers a promise of compliance that often delivers little-to-no actual substance. Consider the wide spread use of pencil and paper tests and quizzes that take up more than 90% of the evaluation time. EVERYONE knows these are virtually useless for making inferences about anyone's ability to actually operate his or her truck. To be fair to instructor/evaluators, their employers and first-line supervisors are frequently oblivious to the problems this can engender, and simply do NOT want to finance the real stuff. And the band named "pretense" played on!)

Sadly, it is NOT the strong suit of most forklift operator employers, trainers or evaluators in our field to construct an evaluation, also known as a test, that is objective, valid, reliable and precise enough to measure the actual ability of one to OPERATE the truck safely in their workplace...OPERATE being the important word, here! THAT is what is required by the OSHA standard. THAT is what employers really want. It is also what the operators want! Few, though, want to act on the required commitment of resources!

So, I think it is a challenge to all operator trainers to keep the pretense to a minimum, or to eliminate it altogether. I DON'T think this is possible without employers who will cooperate in an effort to improve evaluations beyond "let's all vote that we are now in compliance"! To improve upon the ever-important evaluation, we need to "construct" and perform the evaluations on a set of applicable principles; principles of fairness, objective criteria, validity, and reliability. If we do so, we will not only solve the medical condition/evaluation problem that Mr. Vetter describes, but we will be able to solve a great many other problems, too!

Best wishes