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Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process

Each year thousands of workers experience a serious illness or injury that necessitates time off work and a subsequent re-engagement with the work environment. In Australia, workers’ compensation legislation mandates the return-to-work (RTW) process is formal, structured, and negotiated between the...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Woods, Megan, Matthewson, Mandy L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8695797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34956027
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.805855
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author Woods, Megan
Matthewson, Mandy L.
author_facet Woods, Megan
Matthewson, Mandy L.
author_sort Woods, Megan
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description Each year thousands of workers experience a serious illness or injury that necessitates time off work and a subsequent re-engagement with the work environment. In Australia, workers’ compensation legislation mandates the return-to-work (RTW) process is formal, structured, and negotiated between the worker, their employer, health care professionals and their RTW coordinator. How this is executed by those parties directly influences whether the RTW process is supportive and successful, or exacerbates the suffering of returning workers by causing them to feel ostracised, exposed, and vulnerable in their workplace. In this article, we examine how the RTW process can cause physical, emotional, social, and existential suffering for returning workers. We then discuss how the suffering that workers experience can be mitigated by five key factors: clarity of roles in the RTW process, alignment of worker and employer expectations, the advocacy provided by the RTW coordinator, the support provided for the worker’s psychological wellbeing, and the RTW literacy of supervisors and colleagues.
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spelling pubmed-86957972021-12-24 Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process Woods, Megan Matthewson, Mandy L. Front Psychol Psychology Each year thousands of workers experience a serious illness or injury that necessitates time off work and a subsequent re-engagement with the work environment. In Australia, workers’ compensation legislation mandates the return-to-work (RTW) process is formal, structured, and negotiated between the worker, their employer, health care professionals and their RTW coordinator. How this is executed by those parties directly influences whether the RTW process is supportive and successful, or exacerbates the suffering of returning workers by causing them to feel ostracised, exposed, and vulnerable in their workplace. In this article, we examine how the RTW process can cause physical, emotional, social, and existential suffering for returning workers. We then discuss how the suffering that workers experience can be mitigated by five key factors: clarity of roles in the RTW process, alignment of worker and employer expectations, the advocacy provided by the RTW coordinator, the support provided for the worker’s psychological wellbeing, and the RTW literacy of supervisors and colleagues. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC8695797/ /pubmed/34956027 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.805855 Text en Copyright © 2021 Woods and Matthewson. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Woods, Megan
Matthewson, Mandy L.
Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title_full Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title_fullStr Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title_full_unstemmed Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title_short Managing and Mitigating Suffering in the Return-to-Work Process
title_sort managing and mitigating suffering in the return-to-work process
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8695797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34956027
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.805855
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