HELPING INJURED WORKERS GET BACK TO WORK
When you get hurt at work, your livelihood is at stake. If you’re like most of our clients, you’ve worked hard your whole life, paid your own way, and always taken care of yourself and your family. You can’t let a serious injury take all that away from you.
use these exams a lot in our cases to show that someone on workers’ comp or long- term disability no longer has the physical ability to return to their job after a serious injury or illness, so it’s important to have both the technology and the people who understand job functions to do the analysis. Starting with a Functional Capacity exam, she continuously evaluates the person’s physical functioning. And Flora can tell if an insurance company has referred a worker to work hardening too soon, and she
So, you need to find people who get it — I mean really get it.
That’s how we found Metropolitan Occupational Therapy (MOT). One of our clients was in physical therapy there and had such a good experience that we wanted to learn more. First, they take a holistic and compassionate approach to recovery — this is no one-size-fits-all approach. Like us, they treat people like individuals, not a number, and offer a lot of cool services that actually help people, starting with free transportation, parking reimbursement, and reimbursement for public transportation. They have a full range of physical and occupational therapy services, including a certified hand specialist and 8-hour-a-day work hardening treatment to help people with physical jobs — construction workers, mechanics, delivery drivers, nurses — get in shape after a long recovery and rehab, usually after surgery. And, of course, they are an essential business and keep their facilities in tiptop shape: cleaning, disinfecting, and distancing, so people who need it can still get physical and occupational therapy during the coronavirus pandemic. Christina, the business manager, explained how MOT has a case management system to help them beat the insurance company at their own game. (Most medical offices hate dealing with insurance companies, so they don’t, or they procrastinate, or they push it off on you.) The result is impressive — they have a great record of getting treatment authorized. And a lot of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals refer patients to them. That’s really important because a lot of other facilities get all of their patients from insurance companies, and whose side do you think they’re on?
will push back on that. She will also evaluate whether the person has the capacity to return to work and, if so, will develop a program to get them back on the job or a way to maximize their functioning even after a serious injury. A lot of what they do is educational as well, teaching people about their nerves, muscles, and skeletal systems, and how to safely do their job. For example, they teach electricians how to manage overhead lifting, use tools, and do fine motor skill applications like turning screws, and they help retrain nurses to lift and physically care for patients. And here’s something you don’t see every day: They offer “Free Lunch Fridays” for their patients who are in work hardening. I mean, who does that? One of the cool things I also learned about was the support their patients give each other. We all know of the financial, emotional, and psychological stresses when you’re disabled because of an injury or medical condition. At MOT, a real “social fabric” develops, especially in the work hardening program. People make friends here and gain support that helps them make it through a long and difficult rehab and recovery process after a serious injury. -Brooke Birkey
They also have a state-of-the-art work hardening program. Flora is the heart and soul of the program. With over 20 years of experience, she understands the specific and often nuanced needs for work hardening evaluation and treatment. She uses their state-of-the-art BTE machine, which takes data and analyzes it for Functional Capacity exams to measure what the workers are capable of doing at that point. We
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