The coal mine workers' health assessment — formerly known as the coal board medical — is required under the Coal Mine Workers' Health Scheme and the Coal Mining Safety and Health Regulation 2017.
Almost everybody in Queensland coal still calls it the coal board medical, and most clinics still advertise it under that name. The label is retired; the assessment is not.
Of all the credentials a coal mine worker holds, this is the one most likely to catch a business out — not because it is complicated, but because it is on a five-year clock and cannot be arranged in a hurry.
Who needs one, and how often
Every coal mine worker needs a health assessment:
- on entry to the coal mining industry; and
- at least once every five years while working in it.
More frequently if your employer's Appointed Medical Adviser decides it is necessary — for instance where site respirable dust monitoring indicates elevated exposure, or where a previous assessment raised something warranting follow-up. Individual employers and sites may also impose shorter intervals.
"Coal mine worker" is broad. It is not limited to people cutting coal. If your work takes you into the mine's operations in a way that exposes you to its hazards, you are likely to be inside the scheme — which is why contracting companies, maintenance teams, drillers and service providers all end up in it.
Who conducts it
The assessment is undertaken, managed or supervised by an Appointed Medical Adviser (AMA) — a doctor appointed by your employer from the list of doctors approved by Resources Safety and Health Queensland.
Note the name change. The role was previously the Nominated Medical Adviser (NMA), and you will still find the old term on provider websites, in older procedures and in the memory of everybody who has been in the industry a while. They are the same role.
The AMA is appointed by the employer, not chosen by the worker, which means a contracting company's workers go to that contracting company's AMA rather than to whichever clinic is nearest. It also means that a worker changing employers may need to be assessed again under the new employer's AMA, depending on the circumstances.
From July 2026, RSHQ has been running a clinical quality review of assessment practices by approved doctors under the scheme — a signal that the regulator is looking at consistency and quality of the assessments themselves, not just at whether they were done.
What is involved
More than a standard pre-employment medical, and the difference is respiratory.
It is not a single test. What is actually performed varies by role and by state — an underground worker and a surface worker are not assessed identically, and the respiratory imaging component is the clearest place that shows up.
Medical history and general examination — the usual: history, medications, blood pressure, general physical assessment, and a review of the specific hazards of the role.
Respiratory screening — the core of the scheme. A chest X-ray, read to the scheme's requirements, and spirometry (lung function testing). The scheme exists in significant part because of the re-identification of coal workers' pneumoconiosis in Queensland from 2015, and the imaging and lung function components are the direct response to it.
Role-specific assessments — vision, hearing and other components depending on what the person will actually be doing and what risks that carries.
The result goes to the employer as a fitness for work determination, with any restrictions or conditions. The clinical detail stays with the doctor.
The lead time problem
This is the practical heart of it.
Availability of approved doctors varies enormously by location. Brisbane has the deepest supply. Mackay, Rockhampton and Emerald — where a large share of the workforce actually lives — have real capacity constraints, and multi-week waits are routine. It gets substantially worse around shutdown seasons, when several contracting companies mobilise large teams at once and everybody discovers their medicals at the same time.
Plan on eight to twelve weeks, not on the four weeks a generic expiry alert will give you.
The failure mode is entirely predictable and happens constantly:
- A five-year credential falls outside the annual review that catches everything else.
- It is noticed three weeks out, usually because somebody is being rostered.
- No appointment is available within three weeks.
- The worker comes off the roster until it is done.
Nobody made a mistake. The system simply had no way of seeing five years ahead.
Where to get one
Approved doctors operate across Queensland, with the heaviest concentration in Brisbane and in the coal regions:
- Brisbane — the widest choice of providers, and the fallback when regional availability collapses. Worth considering for workers who are travelling through anyway.
- Mackay — the main centre for the northern Bowen Basin. Heavily booked.
- Rockhampton — serving central Queensland and the southern Bowen Basin.
- Emerald — the closest option for much of the central Bowen Basin, with the fewest providers and correspondingly the longest waits.
Your employer's AMA determines where you go, so the practical question is usually not "who is nearest" but "where does our AMA have capacity". If your AMA has only one clinic in one town and your workforce is spread across three, that is worth revisiting before it becomes a rostering problem.
The current approved-doctor list is published by RSHQ, and it changes — check it rather than working from a copy taken some time ago.
Who pays
The employer. The scheme places the obligation to arrange and fund the health assessment on the employer of the coal mine worker, and for a contracting company's team that is the contracting company.
For a contracting business this is a real and lumpy cost. Because everybody entering the industry gets assessed on entry, a business that hired a group of people at the same time will have their five-year renewals fall due at the same time — several assessments, several days of lost productivity, all in one month, five years after nobody was thinking about it.
Worth forecasting, not discovering.
What to do about it
Track it on its own lead time. Not the thirty days you use for everything else. Twelve weeks, and further if your people are in Emerald.
Know the distribution of due dates across your workforce, not just the next one. The question that matters is how many fall due in the same quarter.
Book before the reminder feels urgent. There is no downside to an assessment done early; the new five years runs from the assessment.
Do not rely on the worker to remember. Five years is long enough that nobody does, and the obligation is the employer's regardless.
Keep the clearance attached to the person's record, with its expiry, alongside their Standard 11 and their verifications. Clients ask for all of it at once, and usually at short notice.
