AMP has increased its focus on returning people to ‘good work’, claiming the social connections and routines of work assist in the recovery of life insurance claimants.
Pointing to medical research released by the Federal Government’s workplace health and safety authority, Comcare, AMP Director – Claims, Jen Mitchell said the research demonstrated that if people can get back into their routine, including work if appropriate, they usually had a faster recovery from illness or injury.
Mitchell said that ComCare found that when a person did not work for 20 days the likelihood of them returning to work was 70 per cent, but if time off work stretched out to 70 days, the likelihood of them returning to work dropped to 35 per cent.
Additionally, the type of work people engaged in was also important, according to Mitchell who said it had to be considered ‘good work’.
“Good work is work that is stable, safe, empowering and flexible…”
“Good work is work that is stable, safe, empowering and flexible and apart from the usual benefit of work being able to draw a salary, one of the most important aspects of good work is the opportunity to maintain social connection and support,” Mitchell said.
“These networks play a big part in maintaining our social and physical health, and routine gives people a real sense of purpose,” she added.
Using this approach Mitchell said, “We’ve given our case managers the freedom to get creative with solutions to help customers with their recovery”.
As part of this approach, AMP has organised home cleaning for a claimant with burns so they could focus on their recovery and has supported the retraining of another customer who was told he was unable to work in his chosen career.
Mitchell also said AMP had also provided an ‘ipad robot’ to a customer who could not yet return to the workplace but could work from home, organised for a customer undertaking cancer treatment to take part in an exercise program which aided recovery and connected a customer recovering from a psychological injury with a rehabilitation program that uses equine therapy to build confidence.
Late last year, AMP announced it had also shortened the time it takes to process claims in an effort to get claimants (see: AMP Cuts Claims Processing Time) into recovery and rehabilitation programs sooner.
