Finger Points To Drugs and Alcohol

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Crown Roofing & Cladding has kicked off fingerprint drug and alcohol testing at one of its European sites to promote employee health, safety and wellbeing.

Due to the high-risk work at heights that it carries out, Crown has a zero-tolerance approach to drugs and alcohol misuse. The company researched and purchased the innovative Intelligent Fingerprinting test to enable on-site, in-house drug testing, along with an alcohol breathalyser from the same company, with the objective of ensuring everyone is safe at work.

Crown Roofing and Cladding now has plans to roll out the in-house testing approach to promote positive adherence to its drug and alcohol policies across construction sites in Ireland and other European sites.

Easy to use

Described as exceptionally easy-to-use by existing customers, the fingerprint drug test works by testing a simple sample of fingerprint sweat – enabling results to be determined within 10 minutes. Crown’s own well-trained staff will carry out the random tests in-house as required, acting as a deterrent to help underpin the company’s drug and alcohol policies.

Crown Roofing and Cladding was particularly attracted to the Intelligent Fingerprinting drug test because of its applicability for drug testing in the workplace. Fingerprint drug testing’s shorter ‘window of detection’ gives organisations like Crown a simple and dignified way of identifying potential employee use of cocaine, cannabis, opiates and methamphetamine in the period immediately before their working shift.

 “As a company, we are highly committed to employee and stakeholder health, safety and wellbeing. This is our constant focus. Our objective, from a health, safety and wellbeing point of view, is to keep everyone safe on site and ensure every individual gets home safely each evening to their families.”

– Emma O’Gorman Wall 

COO, Crown Roofing and Cladding

Testing for recent use

"With the help of the Intelligent Fingerprinting system, we have been able to quickly roll-out random drug and alcohol testing ourselves – all in-house," continues Crown's O’Gorman. "Through remote training, our Health and Safety Manager and team can conduct drug testing as and when required. We are randomly testing at one of our European sites at the moment and are so impressed with the system that we’re now looking to roll it out to our other operational sites across Europe and Ireland. The system is incredibly easy to use, and the benefit of being able to own the entire process in-house is very appealing to us. Importantly, the system tests for relevant recent drug use – rather than over a longer period – in line with workers’ union guidelines.”

Philip Hand, executive chairman of Intelligent Fingerprinting, adds: “While our drug testing system is UK-designed and manufactured, we’re increasingly exporting our solution worldwide. As organisations recognise the clear benefits of in-house control of the end-to-end drug testing process, we’re expecting multi-country roll-outs of the Intelligent Fingerprinting drug test system to become more and more frequent. Like many of our customers, Crown Roofing and Cladding also wanted to engage with a single supplier to support its drug and alcohol testing, so we are pleased to be supplying breath alcohol tests as well as our fingerprint drug testing system.”

Fingerprint-based drug testing – how it works

Intelligent Fingerprinting’s drug testing system features a small, tamper-evident drug screening cartridge onto which ten fingerprint sweat samples are collected, in a process which takes less than a minute. The Intelligent Fingerprinting portable analysis unit then reads the cartridge and provides a positive or negative result on-screen for all drugs in the test in ten minutes.

Picture: An introductory video demonstrating fingerprint-based drug testing in action.

Article written by Cathryn Ellis
10th June 2021

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