Workplace productivity is incredibly dependent on worker health and wellbeing. Ensuring your workforce is healthy and happy can be challenging – and sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin.
The first step for many leading Australian businesses is to engage workplace health and wellbeing consultants. For many businesses, particularly those with workers undertaking repetitive manual handling jobs, their focus is workplace injury prevention, triage and management.
Workplace injury prevention, triage and management specialists develop early intervention programs and risk management strategies to help reduce the impact of injuries and poor health. These programs are tailored to the needs of each business and are best delivered by onsite healthcare providers.
Onsite healthcare providers are experienced, AHPRA registered healthcare providers. They have extensive training in various modalities, to deliver a wholistic approach to workplace injury triage, prevention and management.
Your onsite healthcare providers should be knowledgeable about workplace safety and compliance standards, which, combined with years of experience treating workplace injuries, make them an asset to your business beyond the treatment room.
Here are five ways to get the most out of your onsite healthcare provider:
1. Tell them about your workplace
Tell your onsite healthcare provider as much as you can. By understanding the risks and challenges that your workplace is facing, they are better placed to develop tailored solutions.
At an individual level, this is also important. The more your provider knows about your workplace, the better informed they are to make decisions to help workers get better as quickly as possible.
“By allowing your onsite healthcare providers to see workers in action, it can help them to better understand the requirements of the job, and the working environment.”
2. Get them out of the treatment room
A simple way to enhance our onsite treatment services is to get the provider out of the treatment room. This may seem counterintuitive, but getting providers out of the treatment room and into the working environment can provide invaluable information.
By allowing providers to see workers in action, it can help them to better understand the requirements of the job, and the working environment. This information is extremely useful in the treatment room as it can guide rehabilitation, return-to-work (RTW) plans, and recommendations for suitable duties.
3. Get assessed
Completing task analysis is another great way to get the most out of your onsite healthcare provider.
Task analyses are a comprehensive analysis of the entirety of a job. They include detailed descriptions of the inherent requirements of the role, environmental conditions and PPE required.
These analyses are essential for hiring and training of staff. In addition, they also facilitate more robust pre-employment screening and fit-for-task assessments, and allow for a comprehensive job dictionary. It can also aid in the decision making process for RTW and rehabilitation.
4. Get them talking
Training programs and health talks can be tailored to your needs, and can cover many different topics from compliance based manual handling to Mental Health First Aid training.
Work Healthy Australia providers can deliver toolbox talks and supervisor training sessions, covering topics such as injury prevention, manual handling, and how to support injured workers.
Whilst these talks have the direct benefit of education, they also have an indirect benefit. Health and wellbeing talks can help foster a supportive and positive workplace, and can also help to build exposure and confidence of the workforce in the onsite healthcare programs.
5. Health coaching
Onsite healthcare providers are not just skilled in manual therapy and rehabilitation. They can also provide advice on general health and wellbeing, and can help assist the workforce with health coaching.
Through health checks and population health reports, you may note that there are some health concerns in your workforce that need to be addressed.
Onsite healthcare providers can help address these concerns by providing lifestyle advice and health coaching, to reduce the impact that many preventable lifestyle factors can have on a worker.
There are many ways to get the most out of your onsite healthcare provider. Contact us to find out more, or to discuss how we can help you achieve your workplace health and wellbeing goals.