ABSTRACT

It is frequently the case in difficult labor market situations that persons undergoing rehabilitation are unable to return to their original job and risk becoming unemployed. Consequently, it seems extremely sensible to prepare hospital patients who appear likely to suffer from chronic physical or psycho-mental deficiencies for occupational reintegration with a course of combined medical and occupational rehabilitation (MOR), as they would be unable to cope with this problem alone. It is necessary to distinguish between MOR, a process involving physicians, psychologists, physiotherapists, logopedic specialists and ergotherapists, from occupational rehabilitation, which nowadays tends to take place in occupational training institutions (and not in rehabilitation clinics) with occupational trainers playing the key role.

The first step, as soon as a reliable prognosis of the hospital patient’s health status becomes available, is to compare the patient’s performance profile with the demand profile of his or her former job and, where necessary, with that of another occupation for which the MOR program will seek to prepare the patient (Figure 1). The objective of the MOR program will then be to repair or compensate recognized physical and psycho-mental deficiencies. In cases where total occupational reorientation is necessary, a filtering process has to be used to identify job profiles corresponding to the patient’s future performance profile. The MOR objective is to fully restore the patient’s competitive occupational proficiency or, at the very least, to make him or her able to benefit from a further training or retraining program.