Woods Megan, Matthewson Mandy L
Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, College of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia.
School of Psychological Sciences, College of Health and Medicine, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2021 Dec 9;12:805855. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.805855. eCollection 2021.
Each year thousands of workers experience a serious illness or injury that necessitates time off work and a subsequent re-engagement with the work environment. In Australia, workers' compensation legislation mandates the return-to-work (RTW) process is formal, structured, and negotiated between the worker, their employer, health care professionals and their RTW coordinator. How this is executed by those parties directly influences whether the RTW process is supportive and successful, or exacerbates the suffering of returning workers by causing them to feel ostracised, exposed, and vulnerable in their workplace. In this article, we examine how the RTW process can cause physical, emotional, social, and existential suffering for returning workers. We then discuss how the suffering that workers experience can be mitigated by five key factors: clarity of roles in the RTW process, alignment of worker and employer expectations, the advocacy provided by the RTW coordinator, the support provided for the worker's psychological wellbeing, and the RTW literacy of supervisors and colleagues.
每年都有成千上万的工人经历严重疾病或受伤，这使得他们不得不请假，随后再重新融入工作环境。在澳大利亚，工人赔偿立法规定重返工作岗位（RTW）流程是正式、结构化的，并且要在工人、其雇主、医疗保健专业人员及其RTW协调员之间进行协商。这些相关方如何执行这一流程，直接影响到RTW流程是具有支持性且成功的，还是会因让重返工作岗位的工人在工作场所感到被排斥、暴露和脆弱而加剧他们的痛苦。在本文中，我们研究了RTW流程如何给重返工作岗位的工人带来身体、情感、社会和生存方面的痛苦。然后，我们讨论了五个关键因素如何减轻工人所经历的痛苦：RTW流程中角色的明确性、工人与雇主期望的一致性、RTW协调员提供的支持、对工人心理健康的支持，以及主管和同事的RTW素养。
