The Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) has renewed its contract with Trimega Laboratories, an international supplier of substance misuse testing products, to provide drug and alcohol misuse testing services.
The NMC, a body set up by Parliament to regulate the UK’s 660,000 nurses and midwives, uses such testing in cases where drug or alcohol dependency is thought to be affecting impairment of fitness to practice. There would be a Registered Medical Practitioner on any panel that ordered these tests.
Trimega Laboratories has developed a method of testing hair samples, collected on-site or at a London walk-in clinic, that provides an accurate historical record of any alcohol or drugs dependency over a three to twelve month period. Since hair growth is fed by the bloodstream, the ingestion of drugs or excess alcohol in the blood is revealed by analysing chemical markers absorbed by the hair (http://www.trimegalabs.co.uk/
Although relatively new, hair testing is fast-becoming the preferred method of determining someone’s alcohol and drug history because other tests depended on (such as liver function tests) only relate to very recent consumption. It is already being used in the UK by other professions such as commercial aviation and for legal disputes where tests are requested by social services, solicitors or ordered by the Courts directly (http://www.trimegalabs.co.uk/
