Anyone who has spent any time in worker’s compensation claims knows that many, many claims are fraught with problems that aren’t wholly medical or psychological, but that are problems arising out of the workplace injury that nonetheless impact the claim. An apt term for these sorts of problems is “psychosocial difficulties.” Psychosocial difficulties “refer to impairments of body functions under central nervous system control, activity limitations, and participation restrictions such as concentrating, sleeping, maintaining energy levels, anxiety, making and maintaining relationships and keeping a job.” When we encounter a worker’s compensation claim we tend to focus on “medicals and indemnity” because worker’s compensation laws require insurers and self-insurers to pay medical expenses and indemnity expenses and not much else. The problem with this narrow focus is that a worker’s compensation claimant is a human being that lives in a particular psychosocial milieu. Psychosocial difficulties arise because of the “interaction of the health condition, environmental and personal factors.” The fact is that when a worker’s compensation claim is made, claims administrators may be authorizing payments for medical expenses and indemnity expenses, but the path that the claim takes is driven by the interaction of the health condition, the personal, and the environmental, which may include factors beyond the strict purview of worker’s compensation laws. Although extralegal, these other factors may have a profound impact on the nature of the claim and whether it can be administered effectively.
Common examples of “extralegal” factors include such things as financial security, access to secondary income, family stability, addiction, intelligence, etc. In the world of brain injuries and conditions, caregivers and medical practitioners have begun to realize psychosocial difficulties “are common across brain disorders” which “challenges the premise that the medical diagnosis has to be the driver or care.” In the context of brain injuries and disorders, “what people really care about is to be able to continue with their lives.” Hence, approaches to care which focus on helping them “continue with their lives” have been found to be effective. The bottom line is that “the difficulties people with health conditions face in their lives do not only relate to their health conditions but also to personal factors and the context in which they live.” The experience of injury and disability is likewise personal and driven by individual circumstances rather than being uniform across injury types. This impacts everything from treatment response to recovery to motivation to return to work. Hence, in two otherwise similarly situated persons with work-related meniscus tears, one returns to work within a few weeks of surgery while the other person takes many months to recover and experiences progressively increasing complaints ultimately leading to a total knee replacement.
When a person is injured, we consider the condition to be a medical one. When operating from the cognitive modality, we then assume that treating the injury will heal the person. However, the medical aspect of an injury is just one aspect. Injury, though physical or mental in nature, has myriad aspects that affect the life of the injured person. Often the psychosocial aspects of injury are more difficult for an injured person to manage or get over than the actual physical injury itself. When this is the case, claims become difficult because doctors tend to throw up their hands and say they can do nothing more for the person. From a claims perspective, this often triggers an attempt to shut the claim down, or at least end payment of medical expenses. The problem is that even when “medical interventions are exhausted…, interventions targeting [psychosocial disorders] can contribute tremendously to achieving a fulfilled life…” Thus claims administrators often find themselves in the difficult and unenviable position of not having anything to offer to an injured worker who clearly has problems related (in their mind or in reality) to the work injury. The position is difficult because the injured worker will often blame their condition on the worker’s compensation carrier and seek further benefits out of the belief, misguided or not, that continued receipt of worker’s compensation benefits can somehow make her whole again or at least offer the hope of remedy from the effects of the workplace injury. Frequently these “effects” are not primarily medical but instead are a result of the cascade of psychosocial problems that follow injury, interruption of employment, and diminished physical functioning.
One way to address the psychosocial difficulties is to allow injured worker’s to provide narratives of what is going on in their lives as part of the claims process. While this information, or at least pieces of it, often comes out during the course of a claim, it is usually the product of defensive behavior most commonly uttered in frustration, i.e. “but how am I going to pay my rent?” Instead, it might be beneficial to seek out the information actively, to ask claimants what is going on in their lives and how the injury is affecting them. Certainly it will provide good will and may assuage some of the claimant’s anger, but it also could have the benefit of figuring out what is really going on and how that will impact the life of the claim. If a person is frustrated because they can no longer perform an activity, perhaps a claims administrator would be able to direct her to a simple and cost-effective means by which the person can improve or restore their level of function. It can only help a claims administrator to understand what really matters to the injured worker.
It very well may be that the claims administrator will not be able to do much about issues that fall outside the purview of worker’s compensation; nevertheless, it cannot hurt to find out what all of the issues a claimant is facing and learning this information may help a claims administrator arrive at creative and effective solutions in what otherwise seem to be intractable claims. In addition, the earlier the discussion of psychosocial difficulties takes place, the earlier the claimant, with or without help from the claims administrator, can begin to address the difficulties. The sooner psychosocial difficulties are addressed, the sooner claimants are likely to accept their physical condition and move forward in adapting to it. This has the potential to reduce recovery times and to mitigate against the worst effects of disability, thereby potentially lowering both perceived and actual levels of permanent impairment. The law tells us what we have to do, but sometimes doing a little more can go a long way to making potentially problematic claims manageable.
log in to comment
Back to Blog
