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Rehabilitation helps get workers back to work
Page 27
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• Employers prepared to enlist the help of rehabilitation specialists are likely to find that employees off sick with strained backs, wrenched shoulders, and similar injuries are back at work far more quickly than if the problem is left to fester. So says Martin Wynn-Jones, customer development manager at FirstAssist Rehabilitation.
FirstAssist employs a large team of case managers, doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and counsellors. Once the nature of the injury has been assessed, it can arrange for the appropriate course of treatment.
Its involvement is often triggered because a firm's liability insurers are facing a claim from an employee injured at work.
Treatment provided as soon as possible after an injury occurs should mean that the problem won't worsen, and the compensation cheaue will be smaller as a consequence. Bearing this in mind, insurers are often happier to pay for it.
"Rehabilitation is also a service caring employers can pay for themselves, and offer as an employee benefit," WynnJones adds. "It can be called on if the individual has suffered a sports injury, for instance, or hurt themselves while doing some Dr,' at home."
Again, they're likely to return to work more quickly.
This is better carried out privately than by the NHS because it is already overworked, say rehabilitation practitioners and insurers.
"What can happen is that somebody will go to their doctor with an injury they've suffered
at work, the doctor will recommend physiotherapy, then tell the patient that there's a sixweek waiting list," says John Hall, senior consultant at Royal & SunAlhance. "If it can be arranged privately, then the course can start Immediately."
If an employee has to wait, and cannot return to work in the meantime, then he or she is likely to become less fit, more demoralised and resentful.