Please follow this link to legal clarification from the Department of Labor & Industries. This material is important to be read, understood and followed by school district employees.
Please share this document especially with staff who use and maintain eyewash stations and safety showers.
Thank you.
Executive Director’s Corner: The Stakeholder Experience
Clairmonte Cappelle
Executive Director
Clairmonte Cappelle, Executive Director
In the last issue of Sound Advice, I shared our intentionality at aligning our risk management work with our Agency’s END through the program’s Pathway to Change initiative. In this issue, I continue that discussion with a focus on the Stakeholder Experience, one of four areas that make up our Pathway to Change. I’ll address the other three (3) components in future issues.
The Stakeholder Experience component of our Pathway to Change initiative aims to create a consistent, quality experience for school districts, injured workers, and providers. We’ve made a concerted effort at soliciting feedback from our school districts and injured workers through surveys which we recently launched and will be administering on a periodic basis to gauge experience and satisfaction with our services. This will inform changes in service delivery where appropriate.
Injured Workers
Our approach to a consistent, quality experience for injured workers is rooted in an advocacy model. It begins at the time the injury is reported when, in addition to traditional claim reporting information, we solicit voluntarily submitted heritage information to inform the delivery of culturally responsive services. This process results in being informed of the injured worker’s preferred language of communication as well as identification of psychosocial recovery barriers to which solutions can be developed in a timely manner. Another aspect of the advocacy model we employ is assisting the injured worker in navigating across a complex system through consistent and transparent communication where the injured worker understands, in crystal-clear messaging, the major activities and milestones that will occur throughout the recovery and return-to-work process. This shared understanding avoids any surprises and confusion that may frustrate the injured worker and unnecessarily create an unfavorable experience with our services. Lastly, we deliver services with empathy, treating the injured worker holistically, and with compassion and understanding, which builds the rapport and trust necessary to support the injured worker’s functional restoration, recovery, and return-to-work.
The experience we desire for our injured workers as outlined above is consistent with a progress measure of our Agency – that the students we serve experience a racially just and humanizing school system. It’s only befitting that we aspire the same for school district staff who become injured in the course and scope of service to them.
School Districts
We also endeavor to create a consistent, quality experience for school districts with our services. We aim to partner with our school district members to create a safe workplace culture through best-practice loss control services and to do so in a culturally responsive manner. That means collaborating with our school district partners to deliver content for safety education and trainings in a manner that is understood by and resonates with school district staff. It also means that we encourage supervisors of injured workers to stay in touch with them and continue to keep them in the loop on developments occurring at the worksite, thus demonstrating their value to the school. Humanizing the return-to-work process also means providing meaningful, transitional work, and not just menial tasks, as part of the recovery process. Towards that end, we work closely with our school district partners to develop and maintain a bank of transitional duty jobs to be accessed and aligned with the medical restrictions of the injured worker until full duty return-to-work.
Summary
The experience we aspire for our school district partners, their employees, and injured workers is aligned with our Agency’s END of ensuring Success for Each Child and Eliminate the Opportunity Gap by Leading with Racial Equity. We aim to contribute to student success and learning by collaborating with our partners, including vendors, to deliver services that create a consistent, quality experience for our school districts and injured workers and to do so in a culturally responsive manner. In doing so, we hope to contribute to school district staffing consistency and stability through injury/illness prevention and averting unnecessary disability duration through return-to-work programs. This is the Educational Continuity component of our Pathway to Change initiative, which I will address in the next issue of Sound Advice.
Welcome back to our Cheers to Peers column – a space to recognize some of the excellent work being done in our member districts. More “cheers” to Issaquah School District’s Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Group.
1. Acknowledge each employee as a valued individual contributor.
2. Continuously communicate vision/values/goals that must be accomplished.
3. Involve them in root cause analysis, gap analysis; identifying problems and solutions.
4. Provide them with the necessary resources to do their jobs effectively.
5. Be clear about performance standards, acknowledge progress and success.
6. Set and make one-on-one development time with each employee your top priority.
7. Set standards of tolerance, compassion and interpersonal workgroup support.
8. Identify, then remove frustrations and productivity barriers hindering progress.
9. Promote creating a positive work life – creating one’s own positive environment.
10. Tend to your own work life, satisfaction and work engagement.
Let us know how these work for you!
Our surveys to PSWCT Trustees, and claims, fiscal, and safety contacts focused on the stakeholder experience targeting three main areas: Pool Administration (November 2018), Claims Management (March 2019), and Risk Management (May 2019).
Satisfaction with staff services rating professionalism, knowledge base, prompt response time, respectful treatment, subject matter understanding, and flexibility in having needs met all rated at 90% to 100%.
Even matters relating to rates (notifications, transparency, methodology, and benchmarking) surpassed industry averages by reaching 94% to 100% approval in WCT service.
With claims management processes, (first contact, reporting process, access to staff, clarity of written communications, and staff familiarity with our claims), only our hours rated below just 100%.
Risk Management responses scored a solid 100% approval rating on ease of access to staff, value of service to the school district, knowledge on loss control and industrial hygiene, and thoroughness in assisting toward resolution of concerns.
Cool ideas surfaced through the survey feedback tool recommending, for instance, expanding our interpretation services and providing more staff training opportunities such as SafeSchools Online Training. And of course, pats on the back to staff are extremely welcome.
Thank you, Trustees and school district contacts for sharing thoughtful insights that will help the WCT serve you better.
Another Science Lab Safety Success Story!
Welcome back to our Cheers to Peers column – a space to recognize some of the excellent work being done in our member districts. Today we are saying “cheers” to Snohomish School District’s Custodial and Maintenance division.
Snohomish district is making good progress by disposing of approximately 350 pounds of hazardous wastes.
During the last two years, David Wells, Custodial Supervisor and District Chemical Hygiene Officer for science lab safety and Indoor Air Quality began collaborating with Elizabeth Jakab, WCT’s Industrial Hygiene Consultant. Although he has no science background, he does have a logical approach and invited Elizabeth to assess all high school and middle school labs last summer. One of the results of those visits, and the follow-up consult, is the safe and legal disposal of approximately 350 pounds of hazardous chemical wastes just from one of their high schools!
David and his awesome associate, Maintenance Secretary, Inez Garcia are tracking which schools or buildings the waste derives from and David even has transported the waste to the county himself. The Snohomish High School, with one or two small batches from Glacier Peak are the main contributors thus far.
Thank you, David and Inez for your initiative and drive to ensure safe and legal waste disposal.
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Megan Walker, 6-12 Science Facilitator for Federal Way Public Schools reports a delivery to the drop-off site in Bellevue last year of a total of 20 5-gal buckets of science lab hazardous waste.
They are also taking advantage of the King County Small Quantity Generator Voucher Incentive Program (VIP) that provides up to $600 reimbursement per site.
Thank you to Megan and her team who are currently working on delivering more from area schools.
Clairmonte Cappelle
Executive Director
Executive Director’s Corner: Pathway to Change
Clairmonte Cappelle, Executive Director
As summer winds down and the beginning of the school year approaches, we at the Puget Sound Workers’ Compensation Trust and Unemployment Pool (PSWCT/UP) look forward to our continuing collaboration with you to make school districts the safest possible working and learning environment. We remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver unsurpassed claims and risk management solutions to minimize total cost of risk while maximizing injured worker outcomes.
How we deliver on our commitment is just as important as realizing that commitment. We have become intentional about our risk management approach and how it aligns with our Agency’s mission – Success for Each Child and Eliminate the Opportunity Gap by Leading with Racial Equity. How do we deliver risk management services with an equity lens? This edition of Executive Director’s Corner introduces our Pathway to Change, our journey to its adoption, and the outcomes we aspire.
Impetus
Our Pathway to Change was developed out of a desire to strengthen alignment of our risk management work with our Agency’s mission. In our pursuit of becoming an antiracist, multicultural organization, the way we do our work is just as critical as goal achievement. Towards that end, agency-wide competencies were established to guide the manner in which we do our work.
Alignment
Our Pathway to Change consists of four (4) overarching strategic areas. I’ll touch individually on each of the four (4) strategic areas in subsequent editions of Sound Advice. But here is a description of each area:
Stakeholder Experience – To create a consistent, quality experience for school districts, injured workers, and providers.
Educational Continuity – Support school district staffing consistency and stability through injury/illness prevention and averting unnecessary disability duration.
Responsible Stewardship – Protect and make prudent use of entrusted resources.
Employee Experience – Cultivate a culture that fosters staff engagement and encourages best work.
We became intentional about how we can deliver services with an equity focus and in a culturally responsive manner. When the Return-To-Work incentive program was developed, an equity lens was applied to ensure that small school districts were not disadvantaged because of size. The result was the launch this past March of an incentive program that provided meaningful financial opportunity for all school districts to participate in, regardless of size, with each school district allotted a pool of funds to offset wage loss expense.
Another intentional effort towards alignment with our equity pursuits is associated with our conversion a few years ago to a new claims system. Given the increasing diversity of the workforce, as well as the composition of English language learners in the workforce, careful thought was given to capturing voluntarily-submitted heritage information from injured workers that can proactively inform the delivery of culturally-relevant services. This includes interpreter and translation services and access to providers of same heritage, if desired. Research shows that patients of color tend to be more compliant with their treatment plan, and hence have quicker recovery time when treated by providers who share racial identity. Other research, soon to be released by Portland University Library, demonstrates the disparity present within workers’ compensation systems where racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority workers suffer higher rates of work-related injuries and illnesses in the United States compared to their White counterparts. Our goal is to deliver services in a manner that eliminates that disparity.
Lastly, because services delivered by our vendor partners are an extension of the risk management services that we deliver to school districts and injured workers, we’ve requested of them, as part of their performance expectations, to use best efforts to ensure that service delivery aligns and is consistent with our equity focus.
We will continue to be intentional about the way we deliver services. Pursuing risk management initiatives to maximize injured worker outcomes while minimizing total cost of risk in a manner that aligns with our Agency’s goal of Success for Each Child and Eliminate the Opportunity Gap by Leading with Racial Equity is our focus. That goal encompasses injury/illness prevention as well. We aspire to collaborate with our school districts to offer safety and training information in the preferred language of employees who are English language learners to ensure that safety information is understood. We are eager to continue our work with you and your staff to cultivate the safest possible working and learning environment.
Wishing you the best school year ever!
Welcome back to our Cheers to Peers column – a space to recognize some of the excellent work being done in our member districts. More “cheers” to Issaquah School District’s Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Group.
An RTW Kudo Award goes to Mukilteo School District. They created three light duty positions that support the entire district!
These positions allow 5 – 10 people to return to work in a light duty capacity and the district can meet injured workers where they are in their recovery.
This is good for the district and great motivation for the injured worker because it acknowledges their importance and value to the district.
Click the here for our flyer for how to avoid injuries during end-of-year clean-up. You can find an accessible version here.
Our highest incidence of on-the-job injuries occur due to trips, slips, and falls, and the end of the school year is a peak period for these types of injuries due to the increase in cleanup and furniture relocation tasks.
Careful thought and planning are needed to develop safe and efficient ways to perform these activities.
Garbage Disposal
Overloading of garbage cans during the end-of-year cleanup presents a major risk of strain and sprain injury for staff moving the bins. Back and shoulder injuries are common due to pushing, pulling, and emptying of heavy wheeled bins.
Here are some strategies to minimize the risk of injury to custodial staff:
Classroom teachers can play a role in keeping custodians safe during end-of-year cleanup by remembering a few simple tips:
Relocation of Furniture and Equipment
At the end of the school year teachers are frequently asked to ‘relocate’ classroom furniture. Teachers are not furniture movers and often do not have appropriate equipment, assistance, time, or training to complete these tasks safely.
Any tasks involving heavy or awkward loads should only be carried out after thoughtful planning and assessment of risks. The risk of injury can be minimized by:
It is important to ensure an adequate number of staff are available to assist on moving days. Necessary moving equipment must be available and staff must be trained on how to use it.
Simple Safety Tips
Staff should be reminded that their own safety is important, especially toward the end of the school year when there is an even greater temptation to rush to achieve deadlines.
Follow these tips to ensure a safe end to your year!
