Task demands assessment: How Kinesiologists can improve return to function or work

Getting injured clients back to regular function or work quickly and safely has long been recognized as critical. In addition to faster recovery, injured clients experience better mental health and social outcomes when they can get back to functional activities sooner. Employers benefit from faster recovery times as well, by reducing re-training and replacement costs, maintaining “workplace wisdom” and facilitating a healthy workplace culture. Functional assessments and treatment protocols that are matched and tailored to the demands of tasks performed in daily living and/or in the workplace are most successful. A multi-disciplinary team of injury management professionals including Kinesiologists is require to optimize the needs of the client in relation to the tasks they perform.

Kinesiologists play a critical role in ensuring that functional assessments are tailored to tasks, however, functional and job demands analyses are often conducted by other interdisciplinary team members. The Kinesiologist needs a clear understanding of how to interpret these analyses as well as a toolbox of resources for gathering further information about the physical and psychological environment to which the client is returning. In this 60-minute webinar, Anne-Kristina Arnold, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University and head of the Ergonomics program at SFU, will present an overview of a useful task analysis tools, techniques and methodologies which Kinesiologists can use as resources in their practices.

Webinar takeaways:

• Discover resources which you can use to better understand your client’s tasks, whether at home or in the workplace
• Learn how to interpret a Job Demands Analysis(JDA) and recognize where critical demands can inform active rehabilitation protocols
• Recognize where gaps may exist in a task analysis and gain familiarity with other assessment tools/resources which may be helpful
• Apply methods to optimize the return to function and/work for your clients