In brief
Since 06 September 2026 the Physical Agents Regulations, 2024 and the Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024 have stood alone, and most of what they ask of an employer is a cycle with a date on it: a documented risk assessment at least every two years, exposure monitoring, medical screening at intervals set by an occupational medicine practitioner, annual refresher training. [1][2] One duty in the set has no date at all. Regulation 8(7) of the Physical Agents Regulations requires an exit medical screening on termination of an employee's employment, unless screening was carried out within the previous six months. [1][2] It is triggered by a resignation, a dismissal or a retirement, and by nothing else. Regulation 18(1)(b) then requires the record of that screening, along with training, risk assessments, monitoring and control maintenance records, to be kept for forty years. [1][2] So the duty starts in the one process that never touches the safety file, and the evidence has to outlive almost everything around it. This article sets out what the regulation says, why this particular duty is the one most likely to be missed by employers who are otherwise well run, and what to check.
What the regulation actually says
The Physical Agents Regulations, 2024 were promulgated on 06 March 2025 in Government Gazette 52226, and regulation 21 repealed the Environmental Regulations for Workplaces, 1987 eighteen months later, on 06 September 2026. [1][4] We covered that cutover in The 06 September 2026 Deadline: Two OHS Regulations Disappear.
Three provisions matter here, and they work together.
- Regulation 8(4). Medical screening must be carried out by an occupational medicine practitioner, as far as reasonably practicable, immediately before an employee commences employment, and after that at intervals the practitioner determines but not exceeding two years. [1][2]
- Regulation 8(7). An exit medical screening must be carried out on termination of an employee's employment, unless a medical screening was conducted within the six months before the termination date. [1][2]
- Regulation 18(1)(b). Records of training, risk assessments, action plans, monitoring, measurements, medical screening and surveillance, and the maintenance of control measures must be kept for forty years, and must be available on demand to a health and safety representative, the committee or an inspector. [1][2]
Two further definitions frame who this reaches. A "physical agent" is a source of energy that may cause injury or disease after exposure, and the regulations name cold stress, heat stress, vibration, non-ionising radiation and illumination. [1] A "vulnerable employee" is an employee at a higher risk of injury, disease or complications caused by exposure to a physical agent, which is a new category with no equivalent in the 1987 regulations. [1][4]
Webber Wentzel's reading of both new instruments states the same pre-employment and exit screening structure, and the same forty-year retention, for the Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024 as well as for the Physical Agents Regulations. [2] We have read the Physical Agents Regulations at clause level and have not done the same for the Noise Exposure Regulations, so we state the noise parallel on one source and mark it provisional. It does not change the argument, because an employer exposed to noise is almost always exposed to a physical agent as well.
Why this is the duty that gets missed
Look at the shape of the other obligations. A two-yearly risk assessment, two-yearly monitoring and annual refresher training are all dates. Dates can be put in a diary, and a date is what a retained consultant, a safety officer or an annual audit is built to catch. If the risk assessment is overdue, somebody eventually notices, because the overdue thing is sitting still and the calendar is moving towards it.
The exit screening behaves in the opposite way. Nothing about it is overdue until an employee gives notice, and at that moment the organisation is busy with a different set of tasks: the notice period, the final payslip, the leave payout, the handover, the equipment return, the UIF paperwork. Every one of those sits with HR, payroll or the owner. The health and safety file is not consulted, because nothing in a termination process points at it. By the time anyone might think of it, the person has left, and an exit screening cannot be done retrospectively on somebody who is no longer there.
That is why it survives good management. An employer can have a current risk assessment, a competent safety officer, a clean set of training registers and a recent audit report, and still have no exit screening for any of the people who left this year. The gap is not caused by neglect. It is caused by the duty being triggered inside a process that was never wired to the safety system, and no amount of doing the existing work better will connect the two.
The forty-year problem, and who it is about
A forty-year retention duty is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. A record created today about an employee who leaves this month must still be producible in 2066.
Three things make that harder than it sounds, and none of them is exotic.
First, the record is often not in the employer's possession to begin with. Medical screening is carried out by an occupational medicine practitioner, and in most small and medium South African businesses that practitioner is an external clinic or a mobile service. The employer is the one on whom regulation 18 places the retention duty, but the file frequently lives on the provider's system. Change provider, and the historical records do not automatically follow.
Second, the subject of the record is a former employee, and there is no continuing relationship to prompt anyone to maintain the file. Active employees generate reminders; leavers generate nothing.
Third, forty years is longer than the working life of every system the record will pass through. It outlasts the laptop, the accounting package, the office move, the safety officer who kept the folder, and in a great many cases the consultant, the clinic and the business's own filing conventions.
Where it collides with COIDA
The retention duty is not administrative tidiness. It exists because occupational disease appears late.
The 2026 COIDA amendments, in force in phases from 23 January 2026, extended the prescription period for an employee's claim from twelve months to three years from the date of the accident, replaced criminal prosecution with administrative penalties for reporting failures, and required employers to retain earnings records for five years. [5][6] A new inspectorate may enter workplaces, compel disclosure under oath, copy records and issue compliance orders enforceable through the Labour Court. [5][6]
Now put the two instruments side by side. A former employee develops a hearing loss, a vibration-related condition or a heat-related illness and attributes it to work done years earlier. The question that decides the matter is what that person's condition was on the day they left, and the exit medical screening is frequently the only dated, professionally conducted record that answers it. An employer who ran the screening holds contemporaneous evidence of the state of a person's health at the point the employment relationship ended. An employer who did not has no answer at all, and the absence tends to be read against the employer rather than in their favour.
This is the part that is easy to state the wrong way round, so it is worth being precise. The exit screening is not primarily a compliance risk. It is a duty whose main practical effect is protective of the employer who performs it, and the penalty for skipping it usually arrives long after the inspection that would have caught it.
What to check in your own file
None of this requires a project. It requires four questions.
- Does your termination process contain a health and safety step at all? Look at the actual exit checklist that HR or payroll works from. If it lists the laptop, the access card and the final payslip and says nothing about medical screening, the duty has no route into the process.
- Who decides whether an exit screening is needed? The exemption is narrow: screening within the previous six months. That is a question about a date in the occupational health record, and somebody has to be able to look it up while the employee is still employed.
- Where do the screening records physically live, and for how long has your provider agreed to keep them? If the answer is "the clinic has them", establish what happens when you change clinic. The retention duty stays with you.
- Can you produce a named former employee's record on demand? Regulation 18 requires availability to a health and safety representative, the committee or an inspector. A record that exists but cannot be found within a reasonable time is functionally the same as one that does not exist.
GRC Shop view
The following is our interpretation rather than a statement of law.
We think this duty is the clearest example we have found of a compliance failure that is invisible to the two things South African employers actually rely on.
The first is a person. A retained consultant, a part-time safety officer, an EHS manager: whoever it is, their work is scheduled, and scheduled work catches scheduled duties. They are not copied on resignation letters, because there is no reason anyone would think to copy them. When an employer tells us they already have someone, they are usually right that the someone is competent, and that has no bearing on this, because the trigger never reaches them.
The second is an audit. An audit is a photograph. It establishes that the file was in order on the day the auditor looked, and the report is accurate on the day it is signed. Every termination after that date falls outside it. When an employer tells us they have just been audited, the audit was almost certainly fine. It simply cannot see forward, and this duty only ever happens forward.
What connects a resignation to a safety obligation is not more expertise and not a more thorough audit. It is a record that knows that a termination has occurred, knows when the last screening was, and raises the requirement at the point the process starts rather than after the person has gone. That is an ordinary thing for a system to do and a genuinely hard thing for a folder to do, because the folder is not present at the moment the duty is created.
Compliance files go stale. Our system keeps yours current.
The audit is fine. What fails is afterwards, because closing items out happens in email while the evidence scatters across folders, so a year later the report still reads clean and the file no longer matches it. That is not neglect, it is that nothing holds the pieces together between audits.
If you want your termination process to raise the exit screening question before the person leaves, and the record to still be retrievable in forty years: https://www.grcshop.co.za/get-a-quote
Abbreviations
- COIDA: Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act
- EHS: Environment, Health and Safety
- HR: Human Resources
- OHS: Occupational Health and Safety
- OMP: Occupational Medicine Practitioner
- UIF: Unemployment Insurance Fund
References
The sources below are external links to third-party websites. We link only to publicly accessible pages and check periodically that the links still work.
[1] Department of Employment and Labour, "Occupational Health and Safety Act: Physical Agents Regulations 2024, Notice 5952, Government Gazette 52226", 06 Mar 2025. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202503/52226gon5952.pdf
[2] Webber Wentzel, "Recent amendments to the Occupational Health and Safety Act: new regulations", 2025. https://www.webberwentzel.com/News/Pages/recent-amendments-to-the-occupational-health-and-safety-act-new-regulations.aspx
[3] South African Government, "Occupational Health and Safety Act: Noise Exposure Regulations 2024 and Code of Practice for Audiometry, Government Gazette 52226", 06 Mar 2025. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202503/52226gon5953.pdf
[4] ENSafrica, "South Africa: OHASA, Physical Agents Regulations 2024, Noise Exposure Regulations 2024, and Amendment of the General Safety Regulations 2025", 11 Mar 2025. https://www.ensafrica.com/news/detail/9836/south-africa-occupational-health-and-safety-a
[5] CMS South Africa, "From Penalties to Rehabilitation: Understanding the 2026 COIDA Amendments and Its Impact on Workplace Risk", 13 Feb 2026. https://cms.law/en/zaf/publication/from-penalties-to-rehabilitation-understanding-the-2026-coida-amendments-and-its-impact-on-workplace-risk
[6] Webber Wentzel, "COIDA amendments take effect: What employers need to know", 2026. https://www.webberwentzel.com/News/Pages/coida-amendments-take-effect-what-employers-need-to-know.aspx