Guideline (pdf)         

ACOEM's Work Disability Prevention Guideline
and
The Non-Profit 60 Summits Project

ACOEM's Work Disability Prevention Guideline

"Preventing Needless Work Disability by Helping People Stay Employed" is the title of a short document that the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine issued as a guideline in 2006.

[ Note: The work disability prevention guideline is NOT the "ACOEM guidelines" or the "ACOEM treatment guidelines" that were adopted by the California workers' compensation system as the presumptively correct standard of care.  Those guidelines make specific diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations for the care of individuals with common work-related medical conditions, and include typical disability duration intervals for work absence.  They were published as a 450 page book issued in 2004 with the title, ACOEM Occupational Medicine Practice Guidelines, 2nd edition, which is available for purchase under Publications on the ACOEM website.  There is also an internet version available. ]

Dr. Jennifer Christian, president of Webility, led the group that developed the ACOEM work disability prevention guideline.  It is addressed to all stakeholders and:

• lays out clearly the process that determines whether and how people with medical conditions can minimize the life disruption caused by illness and injuries, expecially on their work - what we call the stay-at-work and return-to-work process (or SAW / RTW process).
• makes recommendations for how to improve the way that process works today.
• provides a blueprint for how to:
• help working people cope best with the impact of medical conditions on their daily lives
• improve outcomes for any type of medically-related employment situation, whether covered by disability benefits or workers' compensation programs.

An executive summary and brief overview of the guideline, along with a list of the authors and some useful background material, can be found in an Introduction to ACOEM’s Work Disability Prevention Guideline authored by Dr. Christian.  The official ACOEM guideline has no executive summary and is 20 pages long.  The full guideline is available at no charge either here or on ACOEM’s website at www.acoem.org.  (On the ACOEM website, select "Policies and Position Statements", then "Guidelines", and then "Preventing Needless Work Disability by Helping People Stay Employed".)

The Non-Profit 60 Summits Project

Dr. Christian, Webility's President, is also the founder and chair of The 60 Summits Project, a separate non-profit corporation.  This is a grass-roots initiative whose purpose is to propagate the new way of thinking embodied in the ACOEM Guideline - which has been hailed as a new paradigm for disability benefits and workers' compensation systems - across all 50 US states and 10 Canadian provinces.  To learn more, go to www.60Summits.org.

Guideline (pdf)