How rail labour suppliers plan PTS medicals and D&A renewals before Sentinel blocks them

Sentinel is very good at its job, and its job is not the one a labour supplier needs doing.

At site access, the card gets swiped and the system answers a single question with complete authority: is this person, right now, cleared to be on the infrastructure? Medical current, drug and alcohol status in order, competencies valid, sponsorship in place — yes or no. If the answer is no, the person doesn't work. Not "works while we sort it". Doesn't work.

That's exactly what a safety-critical industry should have at the gate. But notice what the swipe doesn't do: it doesn't warn you in June that the answer will become no in September. Sentinel decides at the moment of access. Planning ahead of that moment is the sponsor's job — and for a labour supplier running dozens of PTS-carded operatives across changing sites, it's the job that determines whether you can actually fill Saturday night's possession.

The medical clock ticks faster as your workforce ages

PTS medical validity is age-banded, and the bands shorten sharply. Broadly: around ten years for someone under 40, six years through the forties, shorter again in the fifties, and down to one- or two-year cycles — eventually annual — past 60.

Read that as a labour supplier and the operational meaning jumps out. A gang of twenty-five-year-olds is a medicals diary you barely open. The same gang twenty years on — which is roughly the age profile of much of the industry — is a rolling programme: bookings with an occupational health provider, appointments that have to land in gaps between shifts, results uploaded to Sentinel before the old certificate lapses. Every band a worker crosses on a birthday shortens the cycle, and the renewal date moves each time. A list typed up in 2024 is already wrong.

Drugs and alcohol: short window in, brutal consequence out

The D&A regime has two dates that matter to a planner.

Coming in: a negative screen no more than three months old is required before initial PTS training and sponsorship. Three months is a short window when you're onboarding a group — screen too early against a delayed course date and you're paying for a second screen before anyone has set foot trackside.

And throughout: random testing continues for everyone on the infrastructure. A positive — or a refusal, which counts as one — cancels the Sentinel card and bars the person from Network Rail managed infrastructure for five years. There's no renewal to plan there; that's a career event. But it's also why the scheduled dates deserve respect: an operation that's casual about medicals and screening windows tends to discover its gaps at the access point, in front of the very client it's supplying.

The rules already require you to see this coming

None of this is optional diligence. The Sentinel Scheme Rules require sponsors to operate a competence management system — one that identifies training, assessment and medical requirements in advance of expiry, not one that reports them afterwards. In other words: "we didn't notice his medical was due" isn't an operational mishap in this industry. It's a failure against the scheme rules you signed up to as a sponsor.

So the question isn't whether to track this. It's whether your tracking can honestly answer, on any given Tuesday: who goes red in the next 90 days? Across medicals on age-banded cycles, D&A dates, and every competence with its own recert rhythm — for a workforce that changes weekly. A spreadsheet holds this the way spreadsheets hold everything: correctly on the day it was made, and then increasingly wrong until someone gets a shock.

Position the planning next to Sentinel, not against it

To be clear about the relationship: nothing should replace Sentinel, and nothing here argues with it. The swipe-in is the industry's safety net, and it should stay absolute. What a labour supplier needs is the layer before the net — the boring, forward-looking one that means the net is never tested.

That layer looks like this: every operative's PTS medical, D&A date and competence expiries in one place, with warnings at 90, 60 and 30 days out. At 90 days you book the medical around the roster. At 60 you chase the ones who haven't been. At 30 you're confirming, not scrambling. The card stays green because the calendar was watched, and the client never learns how close September came to being a problem.

That's the gap Certly fills for rail labour suppliers — the planning system next to the decision system. We've written up how it fits the industry on our rail page, and if an assurance visit is looming, start with the week before the audit.

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