The Future Looks Bright in Industrial Rehab
Our February 2 cover story in print (you can also read it on our home page) looks at the state of practice in clinics and work sites that rehabilitate workers injured on the job, and voila! Work and Industry could be the flagship that takes occupational therapy closest to its 2017 Vision Goal. It's not a done deal by any means, but industry's move toward real work as therapy and transitional work programs that get workers back on the job doing modified tasks or similar ones until they can to back to their own jobs is pushing industrial rehab ever closer to OT. Evidence for treatments in this arena is easy to find and use. It is grounded in functional capacity evaluation tasks and tools, most of which do have backing in the literature. O*NET, an online database of job titles and tasks, also offers several sources for evidence-based accommodation techniques at the worksite that can be very helpful to keeping OT in the picture on Workers' Compensation cases.
Be sure to listen to Ohio transitional work specialist Bill Benoit, this month's guest Webcaster, talk about practice in work and industry, including OT's role of prevention in on-the-job injuries through post-offer screening programs, etc., that help make the most of the employee's skills and help ensure safety on the job for workers with many kinds of disabilities. It will be up online later this week.