The Old College Try

Risk & Insurance, Nov, 1999 by Denise Myshko

workers' comp carrier) and Royal & SunAlliance (the university's commercial general liability carrier). Hollinger says she works very closely with Marsh and the two insurers, relying on their expertise on health and safety issues.

"It's become a very connected group with senior people from throughout the university," she says. "The bottom line is to keep the campus safe, and we had to figure out how to get people to come together as a team."

Hollinger also began a series of employee training programs on various campus safety issues specifically for those workers most at risk for injuries: custodians, dining services, public safety, and maintenance. These four groups accounted for 80 percent of the workers' compensation claims in numbers, Crawford says. Hollinger also does annual training sessions with employees that review possible accident scenarios and the appropriate measures to prevent accidents.

And with the help of PMA, Hollinger began training programs for supervisors on completing accident reports and on general safety issues. The university conducts accident investigations and uses monthly loss-control reports, coded by department, to let supervisors know what their expenditures are. Based on incidence rate and the frequency or severity of the claim, Hollinger is able to develop training programs that address each department's needs.

"We want to find out everything about an incident because we need to know as much about what happened in order to prevent it from happening again and to determine what corrective measures are needed," Hollinger says.

The university hired a medical management company that used nurse case managers to communicate with injured workers, regardless of whether there was lost time as a result of an injury. This function is now handled by The PMA Group. Within 24 hours of receiving a claim, PMA contacts the injured worker, the physician, and Crawford.

"A lot of times, these type of people (who are not losing time from work) and these types of cases fall through the cracks," Crawford says. "If these cases go unchecked, they may treat indefinitely. For their benefit and for ours, we wanted to keep these injured employees in the system to make sure that the case didn't explode or blow up into something more serious a year later involving the same problem and the same doctor. We also wanted our employees who were hurt on the job to have some personalized attention--even if the injury wasn't causing time to be lost from work. The university was conscious of the treatment of all employees involved in the workers' comp process."

While no formal return-to-work program was implemented, the university began to address returning employees on a case-by-case basis. Crawford began to meet informally with supervisors to discuss how to bring workers back to their job and how the job could be modified for those with certain restrictions.

"We began to educate supervisors, management, and even the union, which has a mind-set that people needed to be fully recovered before they return to work," Hollinger says.