RTW resources from Australia

March 14th, 2008 by Julie Ferguson

The RTW Knowledge Base Website is a free service from Australia providing research based information and links to external resources on work disability prevention. We received a notice about this site from Mary Wyatt, an Occupational Physician based in Melbourne Australia. She offered a good overview of the site’s features, so we will take the liberty of using her description of the site:
The Return to Work Knowledge Base was developed by ResWorks (a small Australian nonprofit) with the support of the WorkSafe Victoria RTW Fund. The site has been endorsed by the Australasian Faculty of Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
The website is designed to help with return to work. The site includes:

  • Research papers translated into plain language. The articles can be browsed in interest group collections – employee, employer etc. Alternatively all articles can be seen via the ‘View all Articles’ tab. On the summary pages the article title is the link to the full text. A search facility is available on all pages.
  • Resources – links to useful information on work disability such as patient handouts, work disability reports, treatment guidelines. The link to the Resources Page for each group is at the top of the left navigation menu on the summary pages. Most links are to patient handouts, guidelines, or reports on the topic. Other links are to webcasts or videos relevant to the field.

Research is often difficult to access and for most people research is hard to read. The site translates individual research papers into a format that can be understood and houses the information in a readily accessible format. Topics include consequences of being off work in the long term, medical issues, workplace factors, system factors, and people issues.
There are two broad ways the site can help:
1. Increasing peoples’ knowledge and understanding of the area through reading the information provided on the site.
2. Influencing others. Many working in this area practice best evidence care. However it can be difficult to influence others with a less enlightened approach. The site is designed for sharing of information with the ability to send links to colleagues or print articles (eg for patients, HR managers, supervisors).

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