Handbook of Return to Work ― From Research to Practice

This comprehensive interdisciplinary synthesis focuses on the clinical and occupational intervention processes enabling workers to return to their jobs and sustain employment after injury or serious illness as well as ideas for improving the wide range of outcomes of entry and re-entry into the workplace. Information is accessible along key theoretical, research, and interventive lines, emphasizing a palette of evidence-informed approaches to return to work and stay at work planning and implementation, in the context of disability prevention. Condition-specific chapters detail best return to work and stay at work practices across diverse medical and psychological diagnoses, from musculoskeletal disorders to cancer, from TBI to PTSD. The resulting collection bridges the gap between research evidence and practice and gives readers necessary information from a range of critical perspectives.

Among the featured topics:

• Understanding motivation to return to work: economy of gains and losses.
• Overcoming barriers to return to work: behavioral and cultural change.
• Program evaluation in return to work: an integrative framework.
• Working with stakeholders in return to work processes.
• Return to work after major limb loss.
• Improving work outcomes among cancer survivors.
• Return to work among women with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

The Handbook of Return to Work is an invaluable, unique and comprehensive resource for health, rehabilitation, clinical, counselling and industrial psychologists, rehabilitation specialists, occupational and physical therapists, family, primary care physicians, psychiatrists and physical medicine and rehabilitation as well as occupational medicine specialists, case and disability managers and human resource professionals. Academics and researchers across these fields will also find expert guidance and direction in these pages. It is an essential reading for all return to work and stay at work stakeholders.

Dr. Izabela Z. Schultz is Professor of Rehabilitation Psychology and Director of Graduate Program in Vocational Rehabilitation Counselling in the Department of Educational and Counselling and Special Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Schultz is doubly board certified as diplomate in clinical psychology, American Board of Professional Psychology and as diplomate of the American Board of Vocational Experts. She has received international awards for her innovative research on prediction of occupational disability and professional leadership awards for major contributions to medico-legal aspects of rehabilitation psychology. She has published several books and numerous seminal papers and book chapters in the field of occupational disability and rehabilitation. She is an editor of the Work and Disability Section of Springer’s Psychological Injury and the Lawand a founding member of this international journal. Recently, she completed, with Dr. Sally Rogers, the pioneering Work Accommodation and Retention in Mental Health (Springer). Dr. Schultz is also a co-chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Assessment and Treatment of Persons with Disabilities. She has been leading development of best-evidence-informed practice guidelines in early musculoskeletal pain interventions, in work accommodation and retention in mental health, and in assessment and treatment of persons with disabilities.

Dr. Robert Gatchel is the Nancy P. & John G. Penson Endowed Professor of Clinical Health Psychology and the Chairman of Psychology, College of Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also holds two other positions: clinical research director at the Eugene McDermott Center for Pain Management at the University of Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and director of biopsychosocial research at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. He is the author 23 books, 106 book chapters and 318 scientific research articles. His clinical research, most of it in the areas of the etiology, assessment and treatment of pain and disability, has been continuously funded over the past 30 years from grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He also received a prestigious Research Scientist Award from NIH and has been honored with awards from various organizations such as the American Psychological Association, the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Management, the International Association for Dental Research, the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine, the North American Spine Society, to name a few.