Workers' compensation is a state-run social insurance program that gives financial, medical, and rehabilitation benefits to injured or ill workers on the job
Fremont, CA: Workers, employers, and other stakeholders concerned in workers' compensation administration have long expressed concerns about how well workers' compensation encourages occupational safety and health, as well as the welfare of injured workers.
Injury and Disability Prevention-Organizational Safety
The norms, roles, beliefs, attitudes, and practices of an organization involved with reducing employee exposure to workplace hazards are its safety culture. A safety culture's target is to establish a norm in which employees are aware of the risks in their workplace and constantly look for hazards.
Administration of Claims
System complexity degrades performance. Complexity, delays, and unreasonable disputes in workers' compensation systems have been broadly criticized as factors that raise system costs and harm injured workers by creating an adversarial relationship with employers or preventing timely receipt of required medical care and rehabilitation services.
Occupational Health and Safety
The most often mentioned challenge to injured workers' health and well-being is the atomization of healthcare delivery between workers' compensation and other healthcare payers and contributors. Employers claim that poor communication and fragmentation of healthcare among occupational and non-occupational healthcare providers have harmed injured workers.
Confusion regarding privacy and information sharing may exacerbate the consequences of care fragmentation in group health and workers' compensation. While communications between physicians and claims administrators are still permitted with consent, providers cannot communicate with employers about their ability to accommodate injured workers, effectively rendering occupational medicine's prevention concept obsolete.
