The TB test for employee health

As an employee health personnel, it is important to get an accurate tuberculosis (TB) test result, especially in high-risk individuals.1 Allowing new employees to start work as soon as possible and having a test that is a reliable tool for healthcare personnel screening is paramount.

CDC Guidelines:
What do they recommend?1

In May 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new recommendations for TB Screening of Healthcare Personnel. These are the first updated recommendations for healthcare personnel since 2005. These updated guidelines recommend annual testing on high-risk individuals only, which makes an accurate test even more crucial.

Download abbreviated guidelines

  1. Recommendation for TB screening and individual based TB risk assessment on hire:

    Continue baseline screening of all healthcare personnel upon hire with the addition of an individual risk assessment

  2. Recommendation to focus serial testing on higher risk individuals:

    Decision to perform TB testing after baseline based on healthcare personnel risk for TB exposure at work or elsewhere

  3. Recommendation for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) treatment:

    Treatment, including short-course therapy, is now strongly encouraged for all healthcare personnel diagnosed with LTBI

Doctor with Ipad

A moment of truth

When overseeing employee health, you need an answer you can trust that lowers your risk of conversion and reversion of your screening population. Furthermore, a positive test result may mean the start of treatment that may protect both the employee and the hospital from a deadly risk. A negative test result may spare your employee exposure to powerful antibiotics and allow them to begin work immediately. You need an answer you can trust. An accurate TB test and a clinical evaluation will give you that answer. By finding and treating TB, you are doing your part to help eradicate TB.

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Why does this matter?

There is an increased need for institutions to identify all healthcare personnel who fall into “a high-risk category” which poses a potential challenge to human resource and occupational health leaders:1

  • Temporary or permanent residence of > 1 month in a country with a high TB rate
  • Current or planned immunosuppression
  • Close contact with someone who has had infectious active TB disease since their last TB test

With the recommendation to treat healthcare personnel with positive LTBI test results, these guidelines increase the importance of an accurate result with low-risk of false positive results.

employee health T-SPOT.TB doctors talking

The T-SPOT.TB test advantage

The reliability of the T-SPOT.TB test in low-risk healthcare personnel screening has been extensively studied and demonstrates favorable performance. A landmark study assessed the T-SPOT.TB test performance in greater than 42,000 serial tests across 19 geographically diverse sites that were screening its employees. These sites varied in TB risk.2

  • 98.9% concordance rate
  • 0.8% mean conversion rate (negative result converting to a positive result)
  • T-SPOT.TB results are strongly correlated to known patient and community TB risk factors
  • This study suggests the T-SPOT.TB test is a reliable tool for healthcare worker screening

Learn more about the T-SPOT.TB test

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