Employers, Occupational Health providers & Vocational Rehab

“Vitality360 was very keen help us and they provided the service we needed to be able to support our employees well with persistent pain and fatigue so that they could sustain work.”

Hannah Padfield, Head of People and Culture, IntoUniversity

Do you have an employee with persistent pain, fatigue, or post-viral syndromes, including Post Covid-19 Syndrome (Long Covid), who is struggling to sustain work?

Would you like some tailored support about how to best support this employee?

Are you wondering what adjustments are realistic and of most benefit?

Would you like support to be able to retain this persons valuable skills?

Do you need some guidance around your responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010 and need an expert opinion regarding fitness for work?

Utilise our expertise in this field delivered through our Specialist Occupational Health Assessment Service
A short term, solution focused vocational intervention.

 

What is the service scope?

 

We help people with persistent pain, fatigue (caused by any condition), and post-viral syndromes, including Post Covid-19 Syndrome (Long Covid), to optimise their recovery and manage their symptoms so they can remain in work or return to work, after a period of sickness absence.

Our specialist occupational health assessment service provides realistic recommendations to support an employee with persistent pain and/or fatigue to manage their symptoms around work. Employers receive expert advice regarding appropriate interventions they can offer that are targeted specifically for those with these invisible, fluctuating conditions.

Our experience alongside ongoing research (NICE 2019) indicates that the earlier rehabilitation is offered following symptom onset, the better the outcomes such as capacity to work. Despite continued symptoms, impact can be reversed and capacity for work increased (as shown in graph above).

 

What are the expected benefits?

 

We expect our proposed solution to provide the following benefits to your company:

  • Identify those at risk of being off work for longer and intervention to minimise this likelihood.

  • Save money lost through absence with timely and realistic intervention. The age demographic for these conditions is 28 to 65 years, with 46 as the average, therefore potentially with a substantial period remaining until retirement. If someone who earns £30K per annum is off for a month for example, the cost benefit of our short term intervention is very reasonable.

  • Add value around persistent pain and/or fatigue support regarding employee benefits, stakeholder satisfaction, and your company response to the impact of the pandemic.

  • Clarity and expert clinical opinion on functional impact of rehabilitation in relation to the contracted role and specific needs of your business.

  • Reduced sickness incidence.

  • Improved staff retention.

  • Support business vision & strategy with enhanced productivity & performance.

  • Support and advice regarding statutory compliance in relation to disability issues and the workforce/ reasonable adjustments.

  • Improved employee relations especially in relation to health and welfare.

 

Our expertise

 

We have a fully qualified, multi-disciplinary team of professionals with demonstrable expertise in the pain and fatigue clinical field, all ‘under one roof’. The whole team is experienced in delivering vocational rehabilitation, always keeping work at the centre of our interventions. Our team is skilled at helping clients to really understand what they need from their work given their health condition and how to adapt the employment conditions such as role or behaviours considering this.

Within this team Amanda, our Career & Employment Consultant brings her expertise from more than 20 years working in the career and employment field. She supports people with these long-term conditions to identify and work towards their career goals. Her background brings a fresh perspective to this clinical group, which benefits for the Vitality360 team and all the clients we work with.

 
 

“Through working alongside our client and the employer, Amanda is very skilled at understanding the needs of both, and the need to put together a careful and thoughtful plan that ensures vocational success. She is also very perceptive and has an exceptional understanding of persistent pain and fatigue, which allows her to identify barriers and to offer advice that allows a person to succeed in their vocational future. She has an awareness of the legalities of returning to work, and supporting those with disabilities to get the adjustments and support they might need: often advising employers on their responsibilities in the context of a collaborative, transparent relationship”

Jessica Bavinton, Founder & Director Vitality360.

 

Employees feedback about how this service supported them to sustain work:

 

“The assessment gave me a chance to reflect on my health condition and the strategies I used to manage it. It was really helpful to have the conversations and reflections and they helped me to make improvements and recognise the big impact of the small changes.”

These were the key things that helped this person the most:

  1. Identify small changes that I can make at work to manage my symptoms

  2. Given me the confidence to discuss my needs and ask for adjustments

  3. Collaboratively put together a plan that me and my employer can use to ensure I am protecting my health at work

Another employee identified these three things following our assessment:

  1. Supported me to explore reasonable adjustments to my work

  2. Benefited from someone objective to discuss my work with

  3. The signposting to further sources of support such as access to work were invaluable

Another client says these three things helped her:

“The assessment was the best experience I have had as it was very supportive. I really liked tha tit was focused on my needs aswell as the organisation that I work for. It was also an effective intervention over only a few sessions too”

  1. Discussions were compassionate and reassuring

  2. The advice empowered me to set and maintain better boundaries

  3. The report provided a formalised, structured way to agree adjustments

A further employee reports this feedback:

  1. The assessment helped me to have confidence that I wasn’t asking for too much of my employer in terms of adjustments to help me continue to work well in my role.

  2. The process supported me to agree some new travel arrangements with my employer that would mean I would be better supported to manage my symtpoms.

  3. I have been able to reconfigure a balance in the tasks in my role to be able to sustain working.

Katherine Sewell, Business Development, HR & Compliance Manager commented:

Amanda worked with me over a few sessions to support me with being back at work as someone on our team with ME/CFS. Amanda skilfully supported me to

  1. Examine some of my own attitudes and thinking about how I was working and through this encouraged me to realise that I was still ‘doing a good job; I just wasn’t working in the quite the way I expected myself to- which was based on an outdated view of my capacity.

  2. She helped me to articulate the practical ways in which the role could adapt and the conversations about these needs, to have with my line manager.

  3. The main thing though, was the shift in my own internal attitudes, views and use of symptom management strategies about how work can look for someone with a long term, chronic health condition.

If you have someone in your team who this could benefit please email or call Beverly Knops to discuss how this service can support you.