JW Shervey & Associates

Return to Work Programs

A good return to work program can be the quickest path to reducing workers compensation costs. Integrating the Red Packet return-to-work folder into your accident reporting process ensures consistent reporting, requires sure and certain accountability for employees, supervisors and doctors. Most importantly, rather than creating bottle necks, it helps identify the majority of injured employees who will return to work very quickly without creating additional hurtles.

In other cases, temporary Alternative Duty analyses are very effective in assisting employees remain at work, performing productive alternative tasks until they care released to their regular job.

The few employees who may have secondary agendas are quickly identified with reasonable requests to remain on the job are met with resistance. Delays in reporting can highlight and immediately promote further questioning.

Timely reporting, but them delays in the accident investigation process may suggest issues at the supervisory level. Whenever a doctor fails to respond to a reasonable request for assistance in establishing safe work parameters, it may be worth considering an immediate second opinion.

Job Analyses
- Job Analyses
  
  The best way to avoid needless short-term time-loss claims, which can easily cost ten times more than a short-term medical only, is to have job analyses prepared in advance so they can go with the employee to the doctor on the first visit. Properly prepared, they will help the majority of employees return to the job, or at least the department of injury. Since time-loss kicks in very quickly, these need to be prepared in advance to receive the best return on investment. Keeping one claim medical only vs. time-loss will pay for up to 20 to 30 job analyses, which are reusable.
Alternative Duty Development
- Alternative Duty Development
  
  If restricted from the job of injury, having productive Alternative or Transitional duty options can be invaluable in controlling costs. Many companies are paying the equivalent of two-thirds salary while an injured employee is not at work. Therapy costs to keep someone active cost hundreds more. Alternative Duty can provide a resource to accomplish valuable tasks that go undone, or provide relief help for others to allow them to get to those other tasks. Identifying productive tasks, at least for short periods is usually a lot easier than many think, performing necessary tasks.
Accident Reenactment
- Accident Reenactment
  
  If there's been an accident, the best thing to do is avoid anything similar. Completing an accident reenactment is an inexpensive way to increase awareness and seek employee input of ways to avoid similar situations in the future. Occasionally, an accident reenactment can identify specific questions to be addresses in the accident investigation.
Accident Prevention
- Accident Prevention
  
  Accident prevention isn't a reactionary process. The best ways to avoid an accident is to follow safe and established procedures. It's common to find that some employees have unknown "tricks of the trade" they've developed that can increase production while reducing risk. Focusing on increasing production in ways that reduce risks is one of the best forms of accident prevention. You want to make sure to focus 80% of your energy in the areas where accidents are most likely to occur. We can help you create site maps documenting where accidents have occurred in the past.
  
  Develop polls to ask employees where the next accident(s) are most likely to occur, check with quality control to find out where the most waste is generating, or with maintenance to find out which machines are most frequently damaged due to misuse.
Accident Reporting
- Accident Reporting
  
  An efficient, objective accident reporting process is critical to identify the root cause of an accident or incident. While an employee may have made a bad choice, which will have to be resolved, the actual investigation needs to be blameless and focus on cause. We can modify tried and tested formats that assist even those with limited experience to be able to produce the desire result.
Early Intervention
- Early Intervention
  
  Most employees go back to work very quickly. Our services focus on promoting this outcome. At the some time, some employees may require limited levels of assistance, but need this help very quickly to keep the recovery on track. We design out programs to be very proactive to keep "costly other" issues from developing.
  
  Finally, a small percent of employees will contribute 80% of your total workers' compensation costs. Knowing which claims fall in to this group within days or weeks rather than months is the most critical aspect of controlling the majority of your expenses. Once again, we've designed our services to identify leading indicators of those entering this group, which provides the opportunity to control your greatest cost drivers.