For a majority of the adults that file a personal injury claim, a chief goal of their recovery efforts entails healing enough to be able to return to work. Indeed, according to the legal system, each of those same adults should work to minimize any negative consequences, which might affect the healing process.
There are ways that injured accident victims can hasten the arrival of their time to return to work. This includes following a doctor’s orders, with respect to the taking of prescribed medicines. And the individual needs to showup for any scheduled physiotherapy session.
Agreeing to a proposed treatment; the court frowns on any arbitrary refusal of treatment. Still, the court recognizes the logic behind the hesitation caused by mention of the need to use radioactive materials during a treatment or a diagnostic procedure. Personal injury lawyer in Edmonton knows that a reasoned refusal gets viewed more favorably than an arbitrary one.
Setting the time for an employee’s return to the workplace
In most cases, an employee should plan to return when the treating physician has said that the treated patient/employee has recovered from the accident-related injury. Any employees that delay their return, after getting an OK from the doctor, invite the chance of receiving a reduced compensation package. Their actions will limit the amount of money offered, in order to compensate for a loss of income.
Employers are expected to accommodate the needs of recovered workers.
Sometimes those accommodations relate to details surrounding the duties that will be assigned to the returning worker. It could be that the recovered worker can do most but not all of the tasks that he or she carried-out before sustaining an injury. In that case, the employer needs to juggle employee’s assignments, so that someone else can carry-out a task that proves too difficult for the returning worker to perform.
At other times, those accommodations might concern the returning employee’s schedule. It could be that the employee’s energy level does not match with the demands of a 40-hour work week. In that case, the doctor, employer and employee must work together to determine how many hours the returning worker should be able to handle each workday.
Factors that can limit an employer’s ability to accommodate a returning employee:
The extent to which that accommodation might affect the morale and safety of other employees. There is evidence that creation of such an accommodation would force the employer to deal with significant financial costs. A company’s bottom line should not suffer, due to the completion of changes, in response to an employer’s need to accommodate returning employees. Evidence that the accommodation’s creation would cause the affected work area or work force to fall below the recognized and accepted, i.e. bona fide standards for that sort of dedicated working group.