Temple Physical Therapy Workers' Compensation - Work Hardening

Video Transcript

Work hardening, in relation to physical therapy, is a next step up after having gone through physical therapy. It’s a little bit more vigorous. It kinda get them over that plateau. Doing exercises that require some type of job simulation of some sort. It’s basically geared to get the person back to work full duty. We have a variety of injured workers – being firefighters any type of municipal type of employee. Also the any type of laborious employee. They go out of their way to create an environment that mimics the patient’s workplace and that’s what’s so unique about it. And patients seem to like that. They are much happier with that than just doing a course of physical therapy which may be kind of random. The standard physical therapy has your generic workout machines, but Temple Physical Therapy – the work hardening program they had more – they had job specific equipment for me where I was swinging a sledgehammer, dragging a hose line, dragging a mannequin, climbing a ladder. All of those things that are specific to the job that I do. To be a police officer you have to raise your arms straight out in front of you and hold wait for firearms qualification. And they would have various weight exercises to stretch my shoulder so it would move. And then I was able to hold weight after a while. The work hardening program was designed for myself and my job. The lifting and being able to be agile and move around. So, I think that’s why I was able to go back to work and not be reinjured. How we measure our success here is looking at our patients and how they do the ability and progression here in our program. And also looking at whether or not they return back to work or not. Currently, right now, our return to work rate is eighty two percent and our average visits are fifteen per patient. The work hardening program was great for my self confidence. I left here very confident and ready to get back to work. I was cleared for full, unrestricted duty and I’m come back to work. I’ve been back for almost six months and thanks to the work hardening program it’s great to be back to work and knowing that I can do my job safely and confidently.