Job-specific mandatory medical examinations for the police force.

Background: Mandatory medical examinations (MMEs) of workers should be based on the health and safety requirements that are needed for effectively performing the relevant work. For police personnel in the Netherlands, no job-specific MME exists that takes the specific tasks and duties into account.

Aims: To provide the Dutch National Police with a knowledge base for job-specific MMEs for police personnel that will lead to equitable decisions from an occupational health perspective about who can perform police duties.

Methods: We used a stepwise mixed-methods approach in which we included interviews with employees and experts and a review of the national and international literature. We determined the job demands for the various police jobs, determined which were regarded as specific job demands and formulated the matching health requirements as specific as possible for each occupation.

Results: A total of 21 specific job demands were considered relevant in different police jobs. These included biomechanical, physiological, physical, emotional, psychological/cognitive and sensory job demands. We formulated both police-generic and job-specific health requirements based on the specific job demands. Two examples are presented: bike patrol and criminal investigation.

Conclusions: Our study substantiated the need for job-specific MMEs for police personnel. We found specific job demands that differed substantially for various police jobs. The corresponding health requirements were partly police-generic, and partly job-specific.