Occupational Medicine Is a Win-Win at Work
This is the overlooked pathway to a better health for adults. It is also the medicine for any workplace issue. Occupational Medicine offers solutions when something gets stuck in healthcare rehabilitation, with employment, or a medical insurance. It benefits both employers and employees. Moreover, Occupational Medicine is surprisingly problem preventative and even economically worthwhile for all parties. Below is an explanation on how it fits together for the worker, for the business owner, and for the insurer.
Occupational Medicine Is The Secret Garden of Health
Occupational Medicine is like a hidden gem of medicine. It is the truly proactive branch of medical practice. Occupational Medicine seeks being preventative of human harm and it always endeavours to find constructive solutions when others get stuck. It is very beneficial to the many, but known to ridiculously few. This is likely the main reason for Occupational Medicine not being as accessible as it should be. Most people do not even know about it. Occupational Medicine has been like a silent, unsung workhorse, busy with improving workplaces, reducing all sorts of hazards, and trying to recover the wellness of workers.
Occupational Medicine is a form of Functional Medicine and specialised healthcare concerning the workplace, which is the place where most adults spend much or most of their effort, attendance, and attention. The workplace affects our health. Our health affects the workplace. Failing to relate or act upon this interaction may cause unnecessary friction between the workplace and the health of the worker, which in turn too often leads to unwarranted discord and disease.
How Does It Work?
Occupational Medicine is the mediating, medical link between different workers, their health, and the dynamics and characteristics of a workplace. Additionally, Occupational Medicine can facilitate the balance between the ambitions of a company and the capacity of the employees, as well as translate relevant medical information for business management decision-making and HR practicalities concerning the realities of the workplace.
If there is an injury at work, an illness due to workplace exposures, or an ailment affecting the work capacity of the worker, the Occupational Medicine Specialist is able to assist all parties involved. The Occupational Medicine Specialist can offer medical explanations on what has happened, and usually how and why the incident or accident occurred, as well as provide reliable routes of rehabilitation to a recovery. In New Zealand, Occupational Medicine is included in the general accident compensation system of ACC, as well as other insurers.
Holistic up to a Societal Level
A reliable and robust rehabilitation process consists both of medical techniques and human creativity. This is where the anatomical and mental aspects of the patient, who is either bent or broken by painful circumstances, meet the feelings of failure, frustration, and depression, but also the recovering strengths of trust, hope and perseverance.
A devoted Occupational Medicine Specialist of integrity is not just a technician of a mechanistic system. Perhaps more of a Renaissance approach to the basis of Occupational Medicine, as an art of medicine, would be that it should be composed of the authentic interest in the whole human being, the organic aspects of organisations, different cultural expressions, common and uncommon societal circumstances, jurisprudence in practice, and the varieties of vocational conditions.
The Independent Occupational Medical Assessment
The result of Occupational Medicine, and sometimes Occupational health, is among others the provision of specialist recommendations on appropriate medical and vocational rehabilitation, including recovery at work rather than being prolonged off work. That is, a structured rehabilitation instead of a prolonged recovery process with a suite of repeated off-work certificates, administrative confusion, unwarranted suffering, derailing workplace conflicts, and premature medical retirements.
The Independent Occupational Medical Assessment forms an independent, specialist medical opinion, often with juridical implications, and thereby specific recommendations for the different parties concerned to consider, and subsequently act upon, however, the decisions following the independent medical opinion are of the referrer, or a treating physician, and not of the Occupational physician, who has an impartial, advisory capacity in these matters.
Causality Investigations of Occupational Medicine
The purpose of an Independent Occupational Medical Assessment, including diagnosis, causation and prognosis, is that the insurer, the employer, and the individual patient will be offered rehabilitation recommendations on injury management, fitness for work, wellness guidance, as well as potential treatment options.
An independent Occupational Medicine Specialist provides the insurer with guidance to make an informed decision, the employer with insights and substance, and the patient with a map of the medical situation and a compass of coordinated rehabilitation. The Independent Occupational Medical Assessment should provide answers to: What happened? Why is the rehabilitation uncompleted? How could the current problems be solved?
Partnership for Productivity
Occupational Medicine is not just about injury rehabilitation, fitness for work evaluations, or how to avoid getting ill. For an employer, Occupational Medicine, and sometimes Occupational health, is well-invested money for a partnership in productivity, not just by way of prevention but by health promotion and prehabilitation. This probably should be as evident as having a proper coffee machine, employee perks and benefits, as well as fire insurance, but too many employers do not even know what Occupational Medicine is, or have misunderstood it for being a needless cost.
Occupational Medicine can assist companies with disrupting absenteeism, expensive staff turnover, and minor problems before they turn chronic, as well as Pre-employment health assessments, Medical and wellbeing onboarding, Health risk consultancy, Drug and alcohol testing, WorkSafe issues and regulations, as well as Transport Medicine licensing.
Fresh Ways Forward
A constructive and respectful dialog, or a trialog-meeting (Employee-Employer-Occupational physician) when possible, can offer suggestions on solutions for the worker/patient to either being able to go back to what was, or sometimes finding new ways of abilities to what could be good enough — or different; and perhaps even better than previously imagined. The proposals of a way forward do not always include what the ear wants to hear, but should always serve as a direction for the eye to see what is needed or necessary. Surprisingly often could a vocational redirection be a hidden blessing when one is painfully stuck in the past.
Feeling better is fine; getting better, through a sterner health, can reveal ergonomic steps to serious soundness, supple strength, and the true joyfulness of physical and mental abilities. After arriving at this strong state of being, one should be encouraged by the progress and getting further committed to how to find ways of health promotion rather than just injury prevention. This enables a rewarding stewardship of our human strengths and soundnesses, with the Occupational Medicine Specialist as a strategic partner in medicine, functionality, management, and business organisation.
Passivity Foils Life — Motion Is Medicinal
The individual results of Occupational Medicine are not only about getting fit for work. At times it is about accepting the unwelcome halt at the point of being as good as it can get, however, without being abandoned in the shadow of the past or stuck in traumatic experiences, but to regain or find meaningfulness in spite of a chronic, unpleasant symptomology; acceptance as a revitalised point of departure. Occupational Medicine offers guidance for this change, through a commitment to bettering activities.
Passivity is giving up, while acceptance is not. Acceptance is a mental retreat to reclaim enough strength to find a way forward. A way back to something familiar or at least similar, or to something different and refreshingly creative. It is like a deep breath of purposefulness that we take before getting on with it; realising that we need to rise up after a fall, or reach for the helping hand of Occupational Medicine.
Fitness for Life
Rest is vital, but rehabilitation is not a waiting room. Rehabilitation should be like a fitting room at a considerate tailor. Time in itself heals nothing. The passing of time is just like empty waves against a shore. Suitable activity on a fitting level, with a paced increase, strengthens us to betterment. It is like when one is first lying down, paddling out through the waves, to then push up with regained strength and maintained balance, to be able to take off, surfing the waves that previously were splashing against one’s face.
An appropriate Occupational Medicine consultation should offer health promotion, illness and injury prevention, and sound rehabilitation pathways of having a more profound purpose, strengthened by vocational partnerships, medical treatments, and social support; and with the opportunities of real workplace wellbeing and appropriate workflows, as well as a persistent position of dignity in the ordinary life.