Press Releases

BY YEAR : 2008 | 2009 | 2010

• 09/30/2009
  Employers Get Help For Hiring People With Disabilities
• 09/10/2009
  Ability Beyond Disability partners with Post University
• 09/02/2009
  Injury prevention success!
• 08/24/2009
  Ability Beyond Disability and Men's Wearhouse team up for 2nd Annual National Suit Drive
• 08/21/2009
  Ability Beyond Disability to Hold 2nd Annual Aging Conference
• 08/14/2009
  Ability Beyond Disability Invests in Direct Support Professional Staff
• 07/30/2009
  2009-2010 Board of Directors and Board of Trustees
• 07/08/2009
  Rolling Hills Country Club drives green to Ability Beyond Disability
• 07/08/2009
  Check us out on Chester Elton's Blog!
• PREV | NEXT

Injury prevention success!

Ability Beyond Disability has been collaborating with its workers compensation carrier, Liberty Mutual, to reduce the number of injuries sustained by direct care employees since early 2007.  When looking at the number and nature of injuries from the previous year, Ability Beyond Disability discovered that a great deal of them were behavior related. 

As a result, a group of Ability Beyond Disability employees and representatives from our insurance broker, Rose and Kiernan, got together with Liberty Mutual to come up with a system to better help them understand, track and prevent such incidents. They began in Connecticut where trends revealed that behavior was one of the top 3 causes of staff injuries.  Pilot groups were selected by the Quality Improvement team to offer an accurate cross sampling throughout the state.  

With help from the Behavior Analyst staff, modifications were made to the organization’s injury report form in order for Ability Beyond Disability to better track behavior related incidents and understand the root cause of them

The questionnaire was distributed to 214 direct care staff at 27 different locations during August and September 2007.  The results were tabulated by Dinielli based on instruction from the Ability Beyond Disability Behavior Analyst staff and overall, the direct care staff scored 81%. 

Recommendations were made and Ability Beyond Disability has taken the initiative to greatly reduce the potential for staff injuries resulting from behavior related incidents; addressing those questions which received low scores, standardizing staff meeting agendas to include proactive PMT elements, requiring staff debriefing immediately following a behavior related incident, requiring that the Behavior Analyst staff review debriefing forms, and conducting trainings to enhance overall completion quality of accident reporting. 

In March of 2008 the second round of testing began.  In that run sites throughout the state of New York began being tested for their knowledge of Strategies for Crisis Intervention and Prevention (SCIP), the NY State counterpart for PMT training.  Ability Beyond Disability continued to implement the recommendations and a third and final round of testing was completed in 2009.

The results have been phenomenal!  There was a 26% decrease in work related injuries within one calendar year and a 7% increase in the overall scores of direct care staff on the questionnaires.  These outcomes even led to a decrease in our insurance premium. 

Numbers aside – this initiative has also led to a greater comfort level for employees when dealing with behavior related incidents. Employees have reported that they feel more supported and that interactions with consumers have improved because staff have found new ways to approach behavioral situations.

Ability Beyond Disability has broken into a field that has continuously stumped providers around the country as many similar organizations have struggled with how to affect the relationship between behavior and staff injuries.  Our success has garnered national attention – Liberty Mutual has taken the system nationwide and others are adopting our practices.  Kris Foss, workforce planning and development administrator, Jacqueline Reina, Ph.D., manager of behavioral services, Westby and Dinielli have also presented the initiative at various conferences and forums including: Liberty Mutual’s Social and Human Services forum and the New York State Association of Community and Residential Agencies (NYSACRA) Annual Conference.

Ability Beyond Disability is committed to sustain and improve upon the work that has been done in this area.  The behavior questionnaire has proven to be a useful tool and will continue to be utilized throughout the organization.  Areas that showed consistently low scoring by staff will be incorporated into annual trainings and mini surveys will be distributed in early 2010 to track our progress.

Then in August of 2007, Robin Westby, Human Resources Coordinator at Ability Beyond Disability and Jayson Dinielli, Loss Prevention Specialist at Liberty Mutual, began visiting the homes to distribute a questionnaire that was developed to test employees’ knowledge of Psychological Management Training (PMT), a training that all Ability Beyond Disability employees in the state of CT must go through to teach them best practice methods of conflict resolution and behavior interactions with consumers.