| Home | Specialist Services | Models | Solutions | Contacts |
| The Biopsychosocial Model Getting fit for work and helping people back to work after illness or injury is known as rehabilitation for work (or vocational rehabilitation). This process involves identifying the steps which will facilitate recovery of fitness and function to enable people to cope with their own work or adjusted duties. This is a process which is not well understood, either by patients or indeed even their doctors (GPs and hospital specialists) and other healthcare workers. One problem is that doctors (and therefore patients) understand illness in terms of the medical model (or biomedical model). Using this model, patients complain of symptoms, doctors investigate the symptoms, provide treatment, and patients either get better, or they have further investigations and treatments... What this model neglects to take into account is that how we respond to symptoms and illness is also affected by what is going on in our lives and our state of mind. These aspects are considered in the biopsychosocial model. The biopsychosocial model is the model used all the time in rehabilitation for work. Everyone who goes through an ACC rehabilitation process, for instance, is assessed by this model. And yet so few people have heard of this, or understand the principles. What the model considers is that illness behaviours and recovery are influenced by the physical nature of the illness of injury ('bio'), which in turn is affected by the beliefs and understandings of the condition, and the state of mind of the person ('psycho'). All of this is affected by the influence of family, friends, community and work context ('social'). Thus all of these factors are taken into account in the biopsychosocial model.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
| Home | Specialist Services | Models | Solutions | Contacts Copyright © 2008 Fit for Work Limited |
|||