A quick recovery of an injured worker may not always be simple or easy. Workers agreeing to modified duties or reduced hours, can be beneficial to their well-being, assist with physical recovery and accelerate the return to work process.
Workplace Recovery – Recovering at work is beneficial for the business as they get to retain the worker’s skills and experience whilst they simultaneously focus on rehabilitation. This helps to reduce the costs usually associated with hiring and training a replacement worker. An added financial benefit is this will help minimise the cost of the claim and therefore the resulting increases to the business’ workers compensation premium.
For the worker, the social contact with co-workers during rehabilitation has been shown in many instances to boost the injured workers compliance to rehabilitation and accelerate their recovery time. Research also been states the longer a worker remains absent from their place of work due to a workplace injury, the less likely they will return to work.
There are numerous reasons why recovery at work is an important part of the return to work process and we recommend whenever possible businesses develop suitable duties that allow an injured worker to recover at work.
Here are three tips for employers to assist them in helping their injured workers to recover at work:
- Regularly touching base with the injured worker once they have returned to the workplace. By catching up with the injured worker regularly you can see how they are going and hopefully resolve any issues that the worker flags before they become bigger issues that are harder to manage.
- Keep the injured worker’s co -workers in the loop in relation to what is happening to stop them from jumping to conclusions that the injured worker is getting special treatment or is not pulling their weight
- Consider assigning the injured worker a workplace buddy to support them in their recovery at work. This may further boost the worker’s confidence by acting as a safety net and have a positive impact on their recovery
If you need any assistance in relation to planning or helping an injured worker recover at work, please contact us to get help.
Source: SIRA
Title: Recovering at work
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