Effective management of your injured employees back into your workplace is good business practice. It allows you to manage risk and control loss of productive time and skills. ACC has a step-by-step overview to help you manage your return to work programme. These 7 steps are outlined below:
Step 1: Consider key actions
Successfully returning your employee to work can be linked these key actions.
Step 2: Return to work process
Injuries should be managed in the same way, regardless of how they occurred or whether they happened at work or at home.
Helping an injured worker to return to work is a team effort; everyone has a role to play and responsibilities to meet.
For more information, see the following fact sheets:
ACC1695 Helping employees get back to work: Step by step overview (PDF 55K)
ACC1699 Helping employees get back to work: Common questions (PDF 53K).
Step 3: When an employee is injured
Employees should seek treatment as soon as possible.
Provide information about the job and alternative duties to your employee to give to their treatment provider on the first visit.
If you don’t have information about the job, ACC Work type detail sheets describe the tasks, work environment and functions for a variety of jobs, and may be useful information for the treatment provider. For more information about work type details, see the fact sheet ACC1704 Work type details sheets fact sheet (PDF 1.6M).
If your employee’s treatment provider has information about your employee’s job they can make a more informed decision about when your employee can return to work. Your employee can either give this information to their treatment provider - or you can fax it to the treatment provider directly.
You also need to be prepared for your employee’s return to work. This means ensuring you have gathered the necessary information to allow you to talk to the right people, at the right time and plan accordingly.
Work injuries
If an injury happens at work:
- help your employee to get treatment
- control the hazard to remove immediate danger (short term)
- investigate the incident and place permanent controls to eliminate, isolate or minimise the hazard
- update your injury/incident register.
More information about reporting work injuries.
Non-work injuries
Employees with non-work injuries will also need access to your injury management process, but you don’t need to investigate those incidents.
Step 4: Report work injuries
Recording harm is a legal requirement under Section 2 of the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992. Your incident/injury register should be updated when an employee reports a workplace injury. Steps to control the immediate hazard should be implemented while an investigation takes place. These are usually temporary and short term.
Once the investigation is complete, permanent controls based on the hierarchy of controls (eliminate, isolate, or minimise) should be implemented and the results fed back in to your hazard management system and communicated to your employees.
For more information, see:
Hazard management (external link)
Hazard Handler (external link)
Occupational Safety and Health (external link).
Step 5: Return to work communication and resources
Early, open and regular communication, where everyone understands their responsibilities, will assist the return to work process. Those involved could include:
- you as the employer, supervisor, foreman etc
- other key contacts in your organisation, such as administration
- your employee (and their support person, if they have one)
- your employee’s treatment provider(s)
- a union representative
- ACC.
More information about effective communication.
Step 6: Can your employee return to work?
If your employee is fully fit for a return to work, your support will be important. See Monitor your employee’s return to work.
If your employee is either not ready or partially ready to return to work:
- put a return to work plan in place
- give information about the demands of the job to your employee, their treatment provider(s) and ACC
- let all the parties know if temporary suitable duties are available
- communicate early and regularly.
More about plans to help your employee back to work.
Step 7: Monitor your employee’s return to work
If your employee has had time off work due to injury they will need medical clearance from their treatment provider before returning to work.
Monitoring provides support for your employee and helps to ensure their return to work is safe and within the capabilities identified by your employee’s treatment provider.
Monitoring will also help identify potential issues early, and should continue for a short period after your employee has returned to full duties and hours to ensure there is no re-injury or deterioration.
If there are any identified performance management issues, it is important that you manage them as you would normally. It is equally important that this process is kept separate from the return to work process.
Return to work resources
Printed material about the return to work process can be read, downloaded or ordered from ACC Publications. Just search using the term ‘return to work’.
Contact details
For more help contact an ACC Injury Management Consultant or your employee’s ACC case manager/coordinator. If you do not have these details refer to the Contact Us section of our internet.
Last updated: 15 December 2009