Pre-Employment Colorblind Test

[ean29]

I accidentally posted this in the wrong forum before, so here I am to correct my error!

My boyfriend has a pre-employment colorblind test next week at a large Trauma center on the East Coast. He's never been officially diagnosed as colorblind but finds it hard to differentiate between different shades of the colors. When I went through this process (same hospital) I had to do the dot test where you have to identify the number in the middle of the circle of dots. He's worried that he might fail and concomitantly be denied employment. I couldn't imagine that happening - he obviously has no problem driving (red/green lights) and quite successfully made it through nursing school with no issues.

Have any of you all had experience with these pre-employment tests? If you are color blind, have you found that hospitals still take you on?

Many thanks for the replies - I'm hoping I can reassure him a bit from them!

[caroladybelle, BSN, RN]

It is standard at many places.

As to whether it would bar you from working, it depends on how relevant it is to the department.

I think that it has more to do with making sure that the affected employee knows that they are color blind and prohibited from doing certain tasks such as reading fecal occult/litmus paper/urine dipstick/colormetrics tests. As these are only a very minor parts of some nurses jobs, I would not think it a big issue and a bar to a nursing career. It is easy enough to get another to read the tests, as little as they are done.

In many places all such testing is done via lab, who gets checked and not on the floor at all, since JCAHO has cracked down on this about 10-15 years ago.