Return to Work and Injury Management Services

Comprehensive Injury Management for Business and Industry

At Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, we understand that injured employees decrease productivity and increase worker’s compensation costs. We also recognize that a positive relationship between industry and medicine is critical in today’s worker’s compensation arena. So, we’ve developed a comprehensive injury management program that helps prevent injuries, evaluates and trains employees, and quickly and safely returns injured employees back to work.

• Our Staff
• Program Components
• What Our Patients Say
• More Information

Our Staff

Our dedicated staff of physical and occupational therapists deliver a continuum of care that gets results.

In a recent internal quality survey:

• 83 percent of the patients returned to work.
• Of those, 72 percent returned to their usual and customary job.

We are very proud of these outcomes, particularly given the challenging population we serve. In addition to seeing patients with difficult diagnoses, we also rehabilitate workers deemed unemployable.

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Program Components

Our Return to Work and Injury Management program consists of four components:

1. Injury Management
2. Functional Capacity Evaluation
3. Work Conditioning
4. Work Hardening

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Injury Management Services

Preventing injuries is key to the success of our program, and we offer a variety of services designed to make the workplace safer:

• Injury Prevention Seminars are customized safety education programs that teach employees to understand and minimize the potential for injury.
• Ergonomics/Job Site Analysis brings one of our experts to the workplace to observe and analyze the work environment, workers, and worksite, and then provide guidelines for safety.
• Functional Job Descriptions are generated to evaluate and describe essential functions and critical demands to determine possible modifications in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
• Pre-employment Screening reviews job candidates to see if they can meet the demands of a job.

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Return to Work Services

Functional Capacity Evaluation
The Functional Capacity Evaluation measures an employees’ physical ability to perform work activities, assisting us in developing a safe return-to-work plan and case resolution. Our Functional Capacity Evaluations use the internationally recognized Isernhagen Work Systems, focusing on objective findings.

Work Hardening
Upon an employee’s entry to the Work Hardening Program, he or she receives a work capacity evaluation to compare abilities to the current job description.

In addition to this assessment, the clinic offers a structured work hardening program including work simulation. Workers attend four hours per day, three days per week. During this intense reconditioning and body-retraining program, workers perform real job activities, ranging from that of the sedentary office clerk, to the heavy labor of a construction worker. This environment allows employees to safely ramp back up to their job, providing them with the confidence they need to return to work.

We also train workers on new ways to perform their jobs so they can be safer and stay injury free. The clinic is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

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What Our Patients Say

"Full support from my therapist…he was wonderful and encouraging."
- Patient

"I would have never been able to get back to my job if I didn’t have this program."
- Patient

"Everyone has come out in the best shape of their life and smarter, too. "
- UPS Representative

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More Information

Physicians, employers, or insurance companies may refer workers to our program. For more information, please call.

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