My best HR management idea: Getting doctors’ cooperation on injured employees
March 20, 2008 by Jim GiulianoPosted in: Communication, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, My best management idea, Records documentation, Supervisors
When injured employees returned to work, Frank Barnett found doctors wouldn’t specify what kinds of light duty were OK. Then he figured out a better way to communicate with them (part of an ongoing series).
As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.
When injured employees came back to work in light-duty jobs, trying to get good guidance from doctors was frustrating.
Usually, the injured worker came in holding a doctor’s note saying nothing more than the fact that the worker should be assigned “modified duty.” What the heck did that mean?
We were stuck trying to figure out how to assign the worker to a job that wasn’t too strenuous – or too easy. When we discussed the problem with managers, we realized it wasn’t all the doctors’ fault. How were they supposed to know the physical requirements of each job?
Go by the book
Our answer: Tell them, in the form of a pamphlet that describes the requirements of each job. The pamphlet’s nothing fancy – just a straightforward description of the physical requirements of each job category in our company.
It’s something doctors can use as a basis to describe their definition of modified duty.
The pamphlet produced two great results:
• Doctors now give us better details on how to structure modified-duty jobs, and
• Our managers don’t have to guess about assigning duties that might cause a re-injury to the light-duty worker.
(Frank Barnett, director, Anderson Lithographic Co., Commerce, CA)
Tags: doctors, injured, light duty
March 24th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Visuals help also. I’ve done pictures and videos of the work environment so the doctor can better visualize; they are often more willing to specify what can and cannot be done.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
What you might help is to define the duty as “transitional duty” because it is more representative of the nature of the position and not just PC or Return to Work Speak….it also implies that it is not permanent and that there will come a time when the worker will be reevaluated for full duty.
Our company developed pamphlets that our trust members supply to medical providers as well as injured workers describing our SHAPE (Savings Happen Amongst Proactive Employers) RTW program. The transitional job descriptions need to be established and in place ready to deliver to medical providers before any injury occurs.
Best practice purveyors of RTW will make sure their medical providers have visited their company and are familiar with the work environment. Can’t do that – then use pictures to describe the jobs and how they are done. RTW requires you to think outside the box …..
March 25th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Another idea that I helped my local school board with about 15 years ago was creating “temporary work assignments” or TWAs. These were positions that were created specifically for return to work situations that did not require an injured employee to be placed in a TTD (temporary totally disabled) status. In a busy office such as mine, we didn’t have the luxury of time to write out each specific physical requirement that needed to be addressed. So this idea came up in a meeting one day between myself, HR, and risk management to give treating physicians options to assign an injured employee to the TWA and return them to work as early as safely possible.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
I find that it doesn’t serve to re-create the wheel. Our job descriptions have the physical requirements (in real specifics – not just lift, move, bend) as well as the explaination of the work to be done. I then supply the doctor with a check list that asks basic questions: can an employee sit, stand, walk, etc for 8, 10, 12 hours per day (depending on the employee’s shift) and other questions regarding amount of weight to be lifted, can they lift, bend, stoop, kneel, crawl, do they need any kind of specialized PPE (knee or wrist brace/support), can they wear our standard PPE, can the drive, are they taking any medications that could affect the safe performance of their job and a place for the doctor to note the periods of “restricted activity” as well as a place to indicate that they have read the job description. It has worked wonders for me…I don’t guess what “limited duty” is any more and can easily determine if we can accommodate the restrictions given. I use this for return from Short Term Disability, Worker’s Comp and an absence related to an injury or an accident.
It takes all the guess work out for me and helps me in determining that I am not returning an employee to a duty which will cause a reinjury.