Early RTW Is a Win-Win

Spend a few hours in front of the TV on a weekday, and you’ll get an eyeful of what injured workers see every day—ads for lawyers promising large settlements for their injuries.

That’s why workers’ compensation experts advise getting employees off the couch and back on the job as soon as possible. But in order to accomplish that goal, you have to focus on key issues. Among them:

• Efficient communication among the organization, injured employees, medical professionals, and benefit managers
• Concentrating on the return to work from the outset of injury
• A can-do attitude among all parties involved
• Consistent demonstration of concern for injured employees
• Established policies and protocols to ensure consistency in the process

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Is your workers’ comp and RTW policy effective? Do you even have one? If not, we do, and they’re already written and ready to use, along with every other safety policy you’re likely to need, in BLR’s Essential Safety Policies. Examine it at no cost and with no obligation to purchase. Get details here.

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Day-One Objective

Intracorp^®, a subsidiary of Cigna, provides case management and workers’ comp services (not actual coverage) for employers. Intracorp, which promotes proactive RTW programs among its clients, offers these suggestions:

• Limit a transition program to avoid a "black hole" from which a worker never emerges. Some employers set 90 days as the limit for transitional work.
• Ask a physician as soon as possible for a prognosis for an employee’s eventual return to full employment.
• Consider an integrated approach in which workers’ compensation (job-related) and disability (non-work-related) cases are handled together. Absence is absence, Intracorp points out, so it’s smart to be consistent across the board.
• Establish an early-intervention program that involves clinical personnel, such as RNs and doctors. Intracorp provides its clients with RTW specialists who begin talking to injured employees early in the process, sometimes by phone and sometimes in person.
• If transitional work is not available, consider placing employees in local not-for-profit organizations (such as United Way) while they recover. Provide benefits and vacations during this period.
• Develop RTW policies and procedures that are consistent among worksites. If employees see that everyone’s treated the same, they respond much more positively to the program.

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Get the safety policies you need without the work. They’re in BLR’s Essential Safety Policies program. Try it at no cost and no risk. Find out how.

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Reap the Benefits

According to the Wisconsin Workers’ Compensation Division, employers with proactive RTW programs realize a:

• Lower rate of lost-workday cases
• Decrease in lost workdays
• Reduction in workers’ comp claims incidence

Other research finds that:

• At workplaces with some type of RTW program, the majority of workers will return to their jobs early in their recovery periods.
• Most injured workers want to go back to work.
• Injured employees who miss 6 months of work have only a 50 percent chance of ever returning. Employees who miss a year due to injury return to work in only about a quarter of cases, and those off the job 2 years or more have little chance of ever making it back.

Tomorrow, more RTW advice, this time from General Electric, which has an integrated disability-benefits program that focuses on both work-related and off-the-job injuries.

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