Are Your Personnel Fit and Safe to Perform their Jobs?
There are three primary reasons your personnel may need a fitness for duty evaluation:
- They are being assigned to new tasks or a new job
- They exhibit observed behavioral and/or psycho-social changes
- They are returning to work after being impaired by an injury or illness.
Public Safety Medical’s fitness-for-duty program is designed to secure reprieve for your department over issues involving fitness-for-duty liability. We’ve exercised our rigorous, medically-defensible approach in over 7,500 public safety-related, fit-for-duty cases. We are a one-stop-shop for any necessary medical and psychological evaluations needed.
How fitness-for-duty liability affects your department:
Medical Responsibility is Inappropriately Placed on the Department.
A chief cannot override a physician’s medical decision, yet can be held liable for any observable safety risks within his or her department. Historically, this dichotomy has not only led to lawsuits filed against the department, but also against its chief.
How Public Safety Medical will help:
We ensure medical responsibility for all fitness-for-duty decisions will be placed on Public Safety Medical by setting appropriate constraints on the decisions made by the patient’s personal physician, a specialist or the department administration.
Workers’ Compensation and Overtime could be Inflated.
If injured or at-risk personnel are released to duty prematurely, it could lead to injury for the employee in question as well as their coworkers. This can result in unnecessary expenses.
How Public Safety Medical will help:
We can prevent occurrences of costly workers’ compensation and overtime expenses by ensuring personnel are returned to duty at the appropriate time — not too early, not too late.
Warning signs that could indicate your department is at risk for fitness-for-duty liability:
Shopping for Clearance.
Are personnel visiting multiple doctors until they hear what they want to hear?
Early Return to Work.
Are personnel returning to work prematurely and reinjuring themselves, causing additional lost time? Or are they requiring multiple fitness-for-duty evaluations for the same illness or injury?
Questionable Returns to Work.
Are personnel submitting doctors’ notes that fail to recognize the demands of the job, such as permission to return to duty with a 10-pound lifting restriction? Or, upon receiving doctors’ clearance to return to duty, is there observable evidence that personnel are not able to safely perform essential job functions?
Unnecessary Loss of Time.
Are personnel submitting doctors’ notes that prescribe extended time away from work for issues that are only minor?
Unwanted Liability.
Are doctors calling to ask your administration’s opinion as to whether or not personnel should return to duty?
Click here if you’d like to speak with a Public Safety Medical representative about Return-to-Work or Fitness-for-Duty evaluations.
Click here to request an appointment for a Fitness-for-Duty evaluation.
