RETAIN Kentucky: A return-to-work and stay-at-work program for people with disabilities grounded in the conservation of resources theory

Abstract

This article, the first in the Return-to-Work (RTW) Corner series, summarizes a comprehensive RTW and Stay-at-Work (SAW) program in Kentucky, which is funded by the United States Department of Labor. The program, Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network: Kentucky (RETAIN Kentucky), focuses on RTW and SAW strategies, depending upon participants’ employment status at the time of enrollment in the project. RETAIN Kentucky services are implemented by RTW Coordinators (RTWCs) who help people with non-work-related injuries and illnesses continue in the workforce. The first Phase of RETAIN Kentucky, which lasted for nearly 3 years, is now informing the Phase 2 intervention, which began in October 2021 and will enroll participants for 30 months. In this article, we outline the employment retention problem that RETAIN Kentucky addresses, describe the key features and services of the program, summarize our findings so far, and present future directions for Phase 2.

Providing quality employment services to people living with asthma in the vocational rehabilitation program: A model for meeting the needs of an emerging clientele

“…Recent empirical findings stress the importance of career development and return-to-work services in helping people with asthma and other disabilities remain in the labor force [30]. Rumrill and Strauser [31] advocated a contextualized career development approach for people with asthma that casts the worker's current or customary job within a long-term life-career span.…”

“…In their description of the RETAIN Kentucky statewide return-to-work and stay-at-work intervention that is in its fourth year of operation as of this writing, Rumrill et al [30]…”

Eight Key Areas in Need of In-Depth Examination in the Field of Psychosocial Adaptation to Chronic Illness and Disability

“…Many of his subsequent contributions centered on the applications of forces, tension, and energy to psychic processes and environmental influences, cardinal benchmarks of the somatopsychological movement (Barker et al, 1953(Barker et al, /1977Lewin, 1951). • More recently, Hobfoll's conservation of energy (COR) model (Hobfoll, 1989;Hobfoll et al, 1996) has sparked some interest among PACID researchers in its applications to rehabilitation settings (Roessler et al, 2019;Rumrill et al, 2022;Sorenson et al, 2021); yet the clinical scope of the model's potential contributions to understanding the lives of people with disabilities is far from being fully realized.…”