The benefits of having health professionals onsite to triage worker injuries, proactively engage the workforce in their fitness and strength and assist with risk management strategies for worker jobs and tasks is helping decrease worker injuries and improve worksite culture.

Partnering with Employ Health for onsite physiotherapy involves a designated area on site that is considered a health hub and is where exercise, both preventive and rehabilitative, as well as manual therapy, can take place for the workforce.

What Is Onsite Physiotherapy?

Onsite physiotherapy is an umbrella term for a multitude of health and safety initiatives. These initiatives may include but are not limited to:

Benefits Of Physiotherapy For Your Workplace

Aging Workforce

With an aging workforce many new challenges will start to confront a business. As people age they start to lose physical condition and capacity, with poorer recovery and an increased risk of injury. Research also shows older employees may have more chronic illnesses in their later years requiring more extensive periods of time off work. Employ Health can help to manage these aspects of an aging workforce by assisting with maintaining aging workers physical capacity and educating these workers on the right life choices to avoid, or reduce the risk of, chronic health issues.

Increased Workers Compensation Claims & Premiums

Employ Health’s proactive approach on site to assist with managing a workforces health can assist in preventing many injuries which in turn decreases the number of worker compensation claims and lowers the insurance premium that a business is required to pay each year. These savings can then be spent on further improvements to workers’ health and fitness, improving productivity and culture on site.

Lost Time & Productivity

The more injuries occurring on site the more time that a business is missing skilled workers doing their jobs. In the case of an aging workforce the chronic illness and longer recovery time from injury will lead to increased lost time injuries. Generally these workers are also the most experienced in their jobs and that lost experience, combined with training short term replacement workers, can increase a company's expenses. An onsite physiotherapy program can help to decrease and even eliminate the time lost from chronic illness and worker injuries.

Poor Workplace Culture & Morale

Poor workplace culture and morale can stem from a number of factors that may include high injury rates, a feeling by the workforce that management does not care about them, previous poor management practices as well as poor worker health and/or work conditions. By investing in worker health and fitness all of these issues can be addressed and a happy healthy workforce is a productive workforce.

What Does An Onsite Physiotherapy Program Include?

An onsite physiotherapy program includes a designated room on the worksite that is set up like a traditional physiotherapy clinic with space for diagnosing and treating any musculoskeletal injuries and ideally space to also complete any rehabilitative or preventative exercise therapy.

Employ Health’s online data capturing and reporting systems also help workplaces identify which areas, shifts, and demographics in the workplace are reporting the most injuries, and through partnership with the site we can assist with strategies to resolve these pain areas.

What Is Physiotherapy Good For?

Physiotherapy is a popular treatment option for a range of workplace-related conditions that involve the musculoskeletal system. Injuries in the workplace can be acute strain or sprains but a large proportion of injuries can also be cumulative injuries from repetitive work. Occupational physiotherapists are trained to recognise these conditions and treat them accordingly. They are also trained to be able to identify the aspects of the workers’ jobs contributing to these issues and make suitable adjustments to resolve the issue.

Physiotherapy For Back Pain

Accurately diagnosing the cause of a worker’s back pain will allow the treating physiotherapist to eliminate the tasks of their job contributing to this pain while they are treated with manual therapy and exercise rehabilitation to prevent future aggravations.

Physiotherapy For Neck Pain

Physiotherapists are trained with multiple techniques to be able to diagnose and treat all presentations of neck pain in a safe and effective manner. A worker’s comfort and safety are always the main focus of any treating Employ Health physiotherapist.

Physiotherapy For Shoulder Pain

Shoulder pain can be one of the most difficult areas to diagnose and treat correctly due to the joint's increased mobility. In most production jobs it is not unusual to see many upper limb and shoulder pathologies because of the repetitive nature of workers' jobs and tasks. Being able to correctly identify poor biomechanical control of the shoulder and anatomical positioning with work is important for resolving these conditions in the workforce.

Physiotherapy For Repetitive Strain Injuries

Due to the repetitive nature of many workers' jobs it is not uncommon to see a larger number of RSI in the workplace populace. Employ Health’s experience and training in these conditions is vital to getting the best and quickest outcomes for the worker and employer.

Why Employ Health?

  1. Employ Health only employees full time occupational health physiotherapists. All our time and training is dedicated to the running of successful onsite health hubs, physio and health programs with no distractions from private practice or sporting team commitments.
  2. Since our physiotherapists work only in occupational health the combined workplace experience at Employ Health is extensive, with onsite practice across multiple companies and industries across Australia and New Zealand.
  3. Our unique data capturing systems and reporting functionality allows us to customise the reports to partners to focus on the data they deem important with the ability to  even report to different site requirements within the same business.
  4. Employ Health is a national company with employees in all major states across Australia, as well as a team in New Zealand, making it a true ANZ company.

Frequently Asked Questions

It allows the worker to have any pain or discomfort diagnosed and treated immediately while onsite at work by trained professionals. It improves the workplace culture when workers are able to complete their jobs pain free.

An outcome measure is an objective measure that physiotherapists use to track a worker’s progress from presentation to release. It is used to show, from an objective standpoint, progress in the worker’s injury rehabilitation.

The appointment will be the same as attending a normal physiotherapist clinic with the clinician obtaining the worker’s personal contact details, medical history and consent forms followed by a full subjective and objective assessment and manual therapy or rehabilitation exercise as dictated by the assessment findings.

Onsite physiotherapy is not covered by health insurance as it is a free service provided by the worksite who have contracted Employ Health to deliver this service.