According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)*, an estimated 27,000 people leave work each year following a workplace injury and do not return. In excess of 30 million working days are lost due to workplace injury and work-related ill health annually, equating to a cost of over £16 billion to the UK economy.
The Zurich General Insurance Rehabilitation Team is an in-house group of qualified nurses and allied health professionals who assess and support employees if they sustain an injury directly resulting from a workplace incident. Our team of professionals will help you and your business reduce the costs of injuries and accidents at work by ensuring your employees receive appropriate and timely treatment.
Please note that if you have sites in the Republic of Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, or the Isle of Man, we are unfortunately unable to offer our rehabilitation proposition in these locations due to differing healthcare arrangements.
*Health and Safety at Work, Summary Statistics 2020, published by the Health and Safety Executive, November 2020. www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/
Discover how our injury rehabilitation services provide timely and appropriate treatment to support recovery and ensure a seamless return to work.
Logging a rehabilitation referral using our claims portal takes approximately 5 minutes. You will need to provide a few details of the incident, including:
We do not charge for the case management time (external case management costs start at £1,000 and increase exponentially as the case and time progress).
Any treatment costs would be recorded on your claims experience. By exception, where there is a deductible or if you are non-conventionally insured through Zurich, then there may be some cost considerations to be aware of. Please discuss this further with your usual Zurich sales contact.
Treatment costs vary on a case-by-case basis and no two injuries are the same. We have a contracted national network of suppliers and we have been able to negotiate favourable rates for a number of treatment types. As an example, a typical cost of a course of physiotherapy would be around £300.
We will take into consideration the rehab claims experience when reviewing your renewal premium. Using the rehab offering and early notification of injuries into the team will be viewed as a proactive approach to risk management and evidence that you are taking appropriate and responsible steps to attempt to mitigate losses. However, treatment costs will be included in review. Please remember that our case management service is free of charge for all customers.
In most cases the NHS does a great job particularly in the acute stages of an injury, for example, if you break your leg and are taken to A&E, you will be seen fairly quickly, perhaps undergo surgery and possibly require a short inpatient stay. Whilst you are in the hospital you would be seen by the Consultant and physiotherapy team prior to discharge and then referred to the outpatient services for further treatment after your discharge.
In some areas there can be delays in obtaining access to outpatient physiotherapy services or the number of treatment sessions may be limited. This is where the rehab team would consider stepping in and arranging private physiotherapy to expedite access to treatment and in turn recovery timeframes.
In addition, there are some multidisciplinary teams where treatment is best delivered in the NHS as the private sector provision is sporadic, inadequate and/or fragmented, which would disadvantage the injured party. As health care professionals we act as an advocate for the injured party and we are professionally and ethically bound to see that they get the right treatment, at the right time and in the right place that has no detrimental effect on their well-being.
Our rehab offering is not private medical insurance, as we allocate specific funding for referrals where we can see that this will assist in achieving a quicker recovery and so help your injured employee to return to work in a more timely manner.
The rehab offering is not designed to replace any existing Private Health Insurance (PHI) cover that you may already have in place for your employees.
PHI cover can often have tax implications and we want the rehab scheme to provide free support for your injured employees without them incurring any personal costs.
Tell us about your existing arrangements, we should not impact on these in any way but it is good for us to have an understanding of these so that we can work alongside your existing arrangements.
If you have OH teams onsite then these will still be responsible for managing the return to work, reasonable adjustments and any capability decisions on medical grounds. The service that we provide aims to complement your existing HR and OH policies and arrangements.
No, we only take injuries sustained within the workplace, any provision for non-workplace injuries would be seen as a perk and liable to UK tax implications.
Zurich does not provide this level of cover under the Employers Liability Rehabilitation scheme, but you may have this cover elsewhere such as a group income protection policy or private health insurance.
If their job involves driving under the scope of their job description, then we would provide cover under the rehabilitation scheme.
If they were involved in a road traffic incident on their commute to or from work then no cover would be provided under the scheme.
If they are injured whilst in a public place during their duties, then this would be covered under the scope of the scheme.
We generally do not due to the different healthcare arrangements that exist. From past experience we have found it difficult to demonstrate any benefits as people are already paying for their own treatment.
We can work with you to utilise your own onsite services. Tell us about your current arrangements as we would need to understand how this would work and how Zurich would cover the cost. This may be something that we need to take away to discuss further with the Zurich Rehabilitation General Insurance manager.
In principal, you can use their services. If you provide us with their contact details we can see if they are already within our existing network or look to get them added and incorporate the necessary SLAs and report request to benchmark against our approved providers.
We would recommend that the telephone helpline remains in place, as our understanding of the service is that employees can self-refer to this service.
If you think that there is an injury that meets our criteria and the employee consents to our involvement, then the Zurich Rehabilitation General Insurance offering may also support.
Even if we only complete an assessment and confirm that that they are okay and able to self-manage, there will be a benefit in them having that discussion with a member of our team who will then be able to offer you the appropriate guidance.
This is a personal choice depending on your existing circumstances, therefore we would recommend that you contact us to review the options available to you.
Some customers utilise their PHI cover in the first instance and then utilise the Zurich rehab offering to pick up any shortfall in the level of cover. This would be very much dependent on the Zurich Rehabilitation General Insurance team being involved from the offset and monitoring the progress of the injured party to ensure smooth progression of the two services.
Other customers have distinguished between the level of cover on the PHI policy, sticking to PHI where perhaps the cover includes accidents outside of work and utilising the Zurich rehab offering on all workplace incidents that meet the referral criteria.
For a referral into the scheme to be considered appropriate, the injury must have occurred within the last 6 months and be as a direct result of a workplace incident.
To proceed with a referral, the following information is required:
All documentation should be sent to our central inbox at mmc@uk.zurich.com or provided via our online portal at https://liabilityclaims.zurich.co.uk/link/portal/mmc.
Your employee needs to be aware of the referral and understand why we are getting involved, the scheme offers them early access to professional medical expertise and demonstrates your commitment to their health and wellbeing.
It is important that they consent to the referral and the sharing of their contact details with the Zurich Rehabilitation General Insurance Team. We will require details of the accident, their contact details and their date of birth and, as this is personal data, you need their consent to send it on to us.
We will initially contact them via telephone and we would undertake a number of checks to confirm their identity and outline the scheme further.
How you manage their expectations prior to this call is important as it starts to build the relationship with Zurich and sets their expectations of the rehabilitation scheme and how we can support them.
We want to avoid cold calling your employees as this sets the wrong tone at the start of a therapeutic relationship with the Rehabilitation Case Manager and has the potential to derail the whole process and undermine the benefits of the scheme.
You cannot force your employee to accept the offer and we would not encourage the rehabilitation scheme being used as a management tool as it should very much be positioned as a benefit.
We would however recommend that you document that you made the offer, and their response, as we could use this as a potential failure to mitigate argument if they submit a claim at a later date and are then looking for treatment.
We have a document that outlines the benefits of the scheme at a generic level and a more specific document that outlines what your employee can expect from the scheme and their Rehabilitation Case Manager. We can share these with you in PDF format.
We will also write to your employee at the point where we accept the referral and in this introductory letter they will get a copy of the information brochure that they can refer back to at any point during the lifecycle of their case.
We want them to be informed and be involved in their care and treatment to facilitate a timely recovery and return to work in their pre-incident role and level of fitness.
We see this as a collaborative approach between you, Zurich and your employee where we are all working towards an agreed and shared goal.
We can provide intervention for specific workplace trauma related anxiety that is linked directly to a specific incident at work.
Where you have an employee who is reporting general symptoms of stress and anxiety due to issues within the workplace such as harassment, we can offer limited intervention (capped in the number of sessions offered) as it is difficult to establish the root cause of this and in fact it may be due to multiple factors that are outside your particular span of control.
Any treatment for stress cases relating to factors outside of work, such as poor relationships at home/bereavement etc. would not be suitable for Zurich Rehabilitation General Insurance referral.
In these instances, we would recommend using an employee assistance helpline if your company has access to such a service or direct them to Occupational Health or their GP.
If an employee’s GP is unable to immediately support and there is no access to an Employee Assistance Programme, then please contact us, as we may be able to offer a short-term solution via Zurich Support Services.
The eligibility of RSI cases on the scheme is dependent on the cause of the injury and usually needs more discussion on a case-by-case basis.
Usually we are unable to accept cases of RSI unless the primary cause of the repetitive motion has been eliminated from their workload duty going forward.
Even then our input would be limited with the focus being on them being referred into the NHS for continued management once we had provided a limited course of physiotherapy to assist in the interim.
If they are returning to the same duty we would advise that the injured party is managed under the NHS as the sessions would simply be maintenance in nature which we cannot assist with under the scheme; they should be overseen by Occupational Health (OH) and HR channels if they are unable to continue with their role.
If this person has received an RSI from undertaking a brand new process that has since been removed from their daily activity then please do send your referral through or call us to discuss the options.
The scheme is in place to manage workplace injuries. Hearing loss, cumulative back strain, asthma and dermatitis are conditions or diseases.
We do not offer rehabilitation on these type of cases as it is about managing the risk and minimising the exposure, to limit the effects on your employee’s health. We would expect you to involve your OH teams in monitoring this and putting into place any reasonable adjustments.
Referrals for workplace injuries will be accepted from the date that your cover started with Zurich. We are unable to accept any referrals for accidents that occurred prior to the inception of your Zurich policy.
It is important to remember that the sooner you refer an injured employee to us the greater the benefit will be.
If you have been on cover for 6 months prior to your knowledge of the rehabilitation scheme, then we could look at these cases retrospectively to see if there would be any benefit to our involvement.
The Rehabilitation Case Manager will provide a summary to the main contact point of the referrer following completion of the initial assessment, at any key points thereafter and you will also receive notification at closure of the case.
If you have an OH department, we may share more detailed reports with them, providing that we have the explicit consent of the employee.
We can be contacted via telephone to discuss these kinds of scenarios on a case-by-case basis. You can still refer an employee even if they have not lost any time but continue to struggle within the workplace or their duties as a result of a workplace injury.
Contact our Rehabilitation Team on:
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) website: hse.gov.uk
