https://www.axiomllc.com/blog/occupational-health-solutions-for-preventing-workplace-hazards/You may think an occupational health program is a complex undertaking, right? Wrong!
Employee health doesn’t have to be hard. Learn how to achieve a streamlined occupational health program for your entire workforce, keeping dollars in your pocket from day one!
What Is Occupational Health?
Safety doesn’t have to be complicated.
To keep workers safe, healthy and fit enough to continue doing their job, occupational health is an essential tool every employer needs to utilize.
It protects employees from workplace hazards and covers the worker throughout their employee journey – from “hello” to “goodbye”.
How Does It Apply To Me?
If you’re wondering how an occupational health program applies to you, ask yourself these three questions:
- Is hiring the right employee (the FIRST TIME) important and why?
- How and why should I be protecting the health of my employees?
- What do I do if an employee is injured?
Hiring Right – The First Time Around!
A tremendous amount of time, effort and MONEY are required to bring on a new worker due to recruitment, on-boarding and training.
Aside from the chance you may have hired the wrong person for the job, it’s also a major strain on resources to get each new hire ready for their job.
It’s both a emotional and financial investment you can’t guarantee will pay off.
What happens if that employee you thought was a good fit is injured because he or she wasn’t able to perform the duties of the job?
You guessed it – consider yourself the owner of a new work comp claim and getting to start the process all over again finding a new candidate.
A simple solution to this common employer problem is pre-employment testing.
Pre-employment testing is your key to hiring the right candidate.
For example, functional capacity evaluations are a powerful tool that any employer can use to guarantee they’ve hired someone who can physically handle the job they’ve been hired to do.
It compares their health status and body functions and/or structures to the demands of the job and work environment. This gives the employer a chance to determine how fit they are to do their work, successfully.
Protecting Health Is As Simple As A Test
If you are looking for a way to prevent illness and injury, your answer lies in health protection. This can be accomplished with employee testing such as:
- Physical Exams
- Silica Testing
- Hearing Conservation
- Respirator
- Beryllium
- Asbestos
- HAZWOPER
- Vaccine Program
- Periodic/Random Testing, and more!
Effective Injury Management
Nobody wants to have an employee injury, but they happen. The question is, how often do YOU want them to happen–and how severe do you want those injuries to become?
There are two factors that significantly impact the outcome of injuries.
Early Reporting – Did you know that a delay of reporting by even one day can increase your chance of a reportable outcome by over 60%?
Immediate Intervention – Does every injury require a clinic or ER visit and should you be responsible for medical decision making?
Absolutely not!
Your employees not only need immediate access to care, but the right care at the right time, with the right outcome.
Utilizing a service such as 24/7 triage permits a licensed medical professional to assess the incident and review pertinent medical history.
The employee is then provided with an appropriate treatment plan, based on the severity of their condition.
Many times this will involve conservative care with first aid measures. This allows the employee to remain at the work site, but can involve a formal treatment facility if warranted.
Need to Get an Occupational Health Program Up and Running?
Axiom Medical views employee health as a journey from pre-hire to post-separation.
Our occupational health programs help ensure a healthy workforce that is capable of performing all tasks expected of each employee.
Should an incident occur, we’re standing by with in-house Nurse Case Managers, 24/7. Our incident and injury case management services allow you to provide optimal outcomes and help the employee return to work in an expedited manner.
Interested in learning more about how we can help your employees stay safe on the job ? Do you want to discover an easy way to lower your number of annual recordable injuries?
Contact us today by filling out the form above!
Holly is an ER nurse by trade, but loves content marketing. She was born outside the box and believes everything is better with “sprinkles and sparkles”. She is passionate about impacting lives and uses marketing as her platform for sharing practical solutions to address real life occupational health challenges.
Find out more about our Injury Case Management services or our Occupational Health Programs.