Workplace rehabilitation is the process of helping employees to return to the workplace after an illness or injury which is beneficial to both employees and employers.
Whether the employee is receiving rehabilitation support for a fracture, surgery, depression or other illness, some of the benefits include skills retention, effective risk management, improved productivity and financial wellness (as employees are integrated back into a secure job).
It is essential for businesses to take on a pro-active approach towards rehabilitation and to partner with a multi-disciplinary team of assessors with industry specific experience to assist in the identification and management of adequate rehabilitation.
Challenges by nature
A rehabilitation process is challenging by nature and workplace rehabilitation is no exception. Some employers terminate an employee’s service very early on in the incapacity process, leaving the employee with nowhere to return to.
Economic pressures make a facilitated return to work difficult as people are expected to hit the ground running, even after an injury or illness. Another challenge is the quality of the medical and rehabilitation service in provincial hospitals, which is often the channel that is used during the rehabilitation process.
Workplace support
These and other challenges can be curbed by investing resources into adequate workplace rehabilitation solutions, which differ from industry to industry.
While some industries such as the mining industry offer in-house rehabilitation services, most companies outsource to manage the associated costs. Some larger companies also offer in-house support.
Psychiatric conditions are prevalent in the financial industries and wellness support in this context is therefore imperative. Integrated wellness programmes play a big role in general workplace support.
Because rehabilitation is so multi-faceted, it is advisable to draw on a network of rehabilitation specialists that can assist your CLIENT’S company with facets such as:
• Type of rehabilitation;
• Acute in-hospital rehabilitation;
• Sub-acute post-discharge rehabilitation;
• Work rehabilitation with the focus on managing the residual issues to ensure a return to work;
• Work hardening: this is rehabilitation within the workplace facilitating a successful return to work in a graded fashion so as to build up endurance after an injury or illness. This kind of rehabilitation is focussed on job tasks; and
• Re-skilling and re-training: where a person can no longer return to their own occupation, they can be re-skilled or re-trained to allow them to perform an alternative job.
Early rehabilitation and compliance to rehabilitation is of utmost importance in the outcome of a condition. Research has proven that the sooner the intervention commences, the more likely a person is to return to work within three months, and the shorter the claims payment duration is likely to be.
Making cover ‘a must have’
Part and parcel of the solution around workplace rehabilitation is accident and critical illness cover.
The financial impact of accidents and critical illness has ramifications for employers and employees alike: for the employer, this includes loss of productivity, absenteeism and operational pressure, while the effect on employees includes the cost of healthcare and accommodation as well as the adjustment resulting from the injury or illness.
Having a financial solution in place softens the blow of an already stressful situation, alleviating the burden of financial pressure. In financially difficult times, people see products such as accident and critical illness cover as “nice to haves” with the mind-set that “it will never happen to me”, which is why these incidents are often not budgeted for.
In this regard, making accident and critical illness cover compulsory for employees may in the long run help ease some of the burden of circumstances that are out of their control, and at the same time employees can benefit from group benefits rates.