Work ability risk management and vocational rehabilitation as our core competence

We support the operations of our customer companies in mitigating occupational inability risks. We provide working communities of all sizes and employees insured by us with information, skills and tools for assessing, ensuring and restoring work ability.

In addition to work ability counselling, we offer our customers a risk survey, allowing companies to obtain an understanding of their work ability risk status, and to compare their circumstances with that of our other customer companies. The survey further allows companies to identify their own development areas.

The work ability projects of our customer companies often focus on the working community, managerial work and HR processes that promote work ability. While this is certainly important, also individuals require support; the work ability of individuals also serves as the foundation for the occupational well-being of the entire community. In 2021, one of our development areas, indeed, included self-management and promotion of work ability.

Our collaboration with the Finnish Institute for Occupational Health was launched in the spring of 2021, and we made available to all our customers a service that allows each and every one of us to chart out our own work ability status and also offers tips for upholding work ability. The service was well-received and has been utilised on more than 1300 occasions during the year.

Goal 3: We support our customers in managing work ability risks

Vocational rehabilitation facilitates continuation in working life despite deteriorating work ability

Sometimes illness or a disease may impede the continuation of work. Vocational rehabilitation aims to restore the rehabilitee’s ability to return to working life and thereby reduces the need for occupational disability pensions. The methods applied in vocational rehabilitation include, for instance, work trial, work coaching, further training or retraining, or supporting entrepreneurship.

In 2021, we participated closely in the joint efforts of the industry aiming to improve the impactfulness of vocational rehabilitation. The work has included not only the revision of the measures included in the rehabilitation, but also refining the tools for monitoring and measurement of same. This work is still on-going, but, for instance, in relation to work trials, minor improvements and specifications were already effected in 2021.

As concerns individuals returning to their own work after sick leave, particular attention has been afforded to the need to adjust work tasks, and the statistical procedure has been modified so as to comprise three tiers, to enable us in the future to itemise various work trials better than previously, as well as to monitor whether there are any differences between same in terms of employability and, thereby, to develop the support to be provided towards an even better direction.

We witnessed a decline in the application volumes for vocational rehabilitation, as did other companies. Last year, we issued a total of 187 vocational rehabilitation decisions (2020: 202). We issued advance rulings concerning the right to vocational rehabilitation support or vocational rehabilitation itself in the total amount of 212 (256). Respectively, the number of rehabilitation applications resolved within the entire industry amounted to 6 804 (7 295) and the number of advance rulings made totalled 6 154 (7 295).

It is a priority for us that the supported rehabilitation is impactful. We require for the employability effect of the rehabilitation, as well as the suitability of the intended work, to be assessed prior to approving the rehabilitation plan. We are supported in this work by our insurance physicians, providing us with the medical assessment of the suitability of the working task or the relevant industry for the rehabilitee. Unfortunately, in a certain percentage of cases, the prerequisites stipulated for the rehabilitation are not met. From the applications submitted to us last year, we were compelled to reject 42.8 per cent (34.7). Across the entire industry, the percentage of rejected applications amounted to 39 (35.4).