How long will my injured worker be out of work? How long will my injured worker be out of work? Hello, my name is Michael stack and I’m the CEO of AMAX and that’s a good question to ask and a common question to ask when one of your employees is hurt because you need to have that expectation for how long they’re going to be out and what their recovery time is. If you’re not a medical genius, it’s hard to know if someone hurts their shoulder and has a partial rotator cuff tear, what that actually means in terms of recovery time. I want to talk to with you today about how to know that information by using a really, really handy little tool to help you uncover some of these medical secrets to say, well I don’t really know how long it’s going to be out, but they’ve already figured it out.
Evidence-Based Medicine Injury Duration Guidelines
Other people have already figured it out and they tell it to you in a very simple and easy to use format in the form of evidence-based medicine, injury duration guidelines. And these are provided by two different companies or most commonly by two different companies. One’s called ODG guidelines provided by the work loss data Institute and then MD Guidelines provided by the Reed Group. So two great resources to tap into this and I want to cover very quickly, so take a look at the board here. So this is the evidence-based medicine injury duration guidelines for a partial rotator cuff tear. And you’ll see here there’s various categories and levels that you can look at. So whether the person’s in a sedentary job, medium, heavy, light, very heavy type of job, and then they give these guidelines as far as expected, physiological.
Look at Simple Chart To Find Your Answer
So how long should it take that person’s body to physically heal for them to be able to be back to work in these different categories of jobs. So pretty general categories, but you could know where your forklift driver fits versus where your office worker fits. If you know what I’m saying, so let’s take a look here. So you’ve got your minimum, your optimum, and then your maximum physiological time that will be required for that person to return to work and you’ve got zero and it goes up to 21,42, 85 etc. And you can just figure out on that little chart there of what that looks like for you. So if you asked yourself that question, how long will my injured worker be out of work? Go ahead and take a look at this chart and have that expectation. Here’s what I also want you to realize, and this is if you’re not familiar with some of this, it will kind of probably surprise you, is that when you look at this, you see these guidelines even for the very heaviest positions of the heaviest light do or heaviest job required here, the maximum out of work time physiologically is 85 days for the most physically demanding jobs that are available.
50%+ Employees are Not Back to Work Within Maximum Expected Recovery Time
If you look at what the actual data says in both ODG and MD guidelines provide this actual data, you will see that actually only 5% of people are back to work within 18 days, so 5% of people are back to work within 18 days and the median so meaning 50% more and 50% less are back to work in 95 days, so more than 50% of people aren’t back to work within the maximum amount of time required for physical healing. Now that should put you on edge to say, what are we doing wrong? Why are we missing this? Look at some of this data, leveraging some of this data and you’ll see that if you have this type of injury, almost all of your people should be back here in some sort of light-duty job within at most four days and that should be your goal.
Getting them in that transitional duty position to start healing. Then continuing to progress them back towards their medium heavy and light duty positions, evidence-based medicine injury degree. Injury duration guidelines are a very handy and useful tool for you to implement into your work comp management program. If you’re using them, use them more. Tap into them, leverage them more if you’re not using them. I recommend starting today.
Again, my name is Michael stack and CEO of AMAXX, and remember your work today in workers’ compensation will have a dramatic impact on your company’s bottom line, but it will have a dramatic impact on someone’s life. So be great.
Author Michael Stack, CEO Amaxx LLC. He is an expert in workers’ compensation cost containment systems and helps employers reduce their workers’ comp costs by 20% to 50%. He works as a consultant to large and mid-market clients, is a co-author of Your Ultimate Guide To Mastering Workers Comp Costs, a comprehensive step-by-step manual of cost containment strategies based on hands-on field experience, and is founder & lead trainer of Amaxx Workers’ Comp Training Center .
Contact: mstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com.
Workers’ Comp Roundup Blog: http://blog.reduceyourworkerscomp.com/
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