Is There a Lack of Trust Among Injured Workers in Missouri?

Learn how employer-employee relationships affect workers’ compensation claims and their outcomes.

A recent report published in the CFO Magazine made an attempt to find out how employer-employee relationships impact workers’ compensation outcomes. The report referred to studies from the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) on how lack of trust affects an injured worker’s disability duration. The studies identified some major predictors of worker outcomes. The predictors can help employers and health care providers improve the quality of treatment and communication an injured employee receives after suffering an injury from a work-related accident.

Studies Identify Trust as a New Predictor

“The studies, ‘Predictors of Worker Outcomes’, found trust in the workplace to be one of the more significant predictors, which has not been examined before,” according to the report by the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI).

The researchers used a simple and straightforward methodology for the study. In order to identify the level of trust or mistrust in an employer-employee relationship, the researchers interviewed injured workers and asked them a number of questions, such as, whether they were afraid of being fired as a result of the injury. Here is a look at some major findings from the WCRI studies.

Fearful of Losing Their Job

Around 20 percent of the respondents who were afraid of being fired as a result of their injury said that they were on leave from work at the time of the interview. In comparison, only 10 percent of the workers not concerned about being fired reported that they were not working at the time of the interview. Return to work outcomes experienced by the workers who were afraid of losing their job after the injury were not as good as the outcomes experienced by the workers without those concerns. The average disability duration of an injured worker extends by four weeks when the injured worker faces concerns about being fired.

Respondents who were afraid of being fired said that they were around 21 percent dissatisfied with the quality of care they received, compared to only 9 percent dissatisfaction among workers who were not concerned about being fired.

Only around 10 percent of the workers who were not worried about losing their job had faced problems accessing treatment after the injury, compared to an estimated 23 percent of workers with concerns about being fired. Significant loss of earnings were reported by around 16 percent of the workers concerned about being fired, compared to only three percent of the workers who were not worried about being fired.

Negative Outcomes

The studies show that any injured employee who is concerned about being fired after an injury is likely to experience the following outcomes:

• significant loss of earnings
• longer disability duration
• substandard medical care
• problems in accessing proper care