What Is Disability Management?

Disability management refers to the process of proactively minimizing the impacts of a person’s impairment or disability in order to help them participate in a work environment and be competitive with their co-workers.

Managing disability in the workplace is likely to become more important as the workforce ages and the prevalence of chronic conditions increases in the working population. People with disabilities were in the past not encouraged to return to work. However there is a now a growing awareness that recovery from disease or other medical conditions should automatically lead a worker to return to their former position and that only workers with the most serious conditions or disabilities should be disqualified from continuing employment. Managing the effects of a specific disability on a person’s ability to work seeks to achieve this and argues that both psychological and social factors also need to be considered.