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Jasen Walker
Jasen M. Walker (born in Hack’s Point, Maryland on May 6, 1949) is an American educator, vocational expert, and disability management consultant who has more than 30 years of experience working with various issues related to occupational disability, including its prevention. Walker is President of CEC Associates, Inc., with offices in Valley Forge, PA and Miami Beach, FL. He has a national reputation for providing expert testimony in personal injury litigations, conducting seminars for medical, rehabilitation and legal professionals, and teaching employers how to integrate state-of-the-art disability management programs with their daily operational processes. Walker and his long-time associate, Dr. Fred Heffner, have developed innovative methods of disability management in the workplace and written numerous articles on vocational rehabilitation and allied constructs. Walker and CEC also publish the rehabilitation profession’s longest running newsletter on human factors in the workplace. Walker and Heffner have compiled texts on workplace disability prevention and management as well as disability proneness.

Walker started CEC with his wife Esther Weiss, a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor and highly experienced Professional Counselor. He is the father of three sons: Ross, Gabriel, and Jacob. Walker teaches graduate level courses in rehabilitation psychology, career development, and positive psychology.

Disability Management Programs
At the heart of Walker’s work at CEC Associates is the development of Disability Management programs in the workplace. Historically, when employees were injured at work, employers hired third party claims and rehabilitation services to outplace the employee by finding him/her employment in another company or by litigating the workers’ compensation claim with the hope of proving the injured employee could work. Often, this resulted in a “cash and carry” type of settlement. For their part, injured workers were either content to remain on workers’ compensation payments for the rest of their lives or rendered helpless by attempting to navigate a lost time system in which they found few positive alternatives to remaining at home. Employers simply wrote off the losses as a means of doing business. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many individual state workers’ compensation systems became overburdened, and with the onset of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Walker and several other pioneering rehabilitation professionals working in the private sector saw merit in the organizational management (and prevention) of workplace disability.

CEC Associates (and several other companies) were interested in applying “return-to-work” concepts and began to document “best practice” methods and innovate new strategies that urged employers to value their employees and to apply methods that would return injured workers to productivity. The return-to-work movement was based on the premise that by doing so, employers would dramatically reduce their operational costs and retain experienced employees. For a more detailed description of a Disability Management Program and how to implement one see: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_Management_Program www.wikihow.com/Implement-a-Disability-Management-Program

Among the methods Walker and Heffner originated were:


 * identifying the components of a Disability Management (DM) program
 * creating a comprehensive lexicon (Workipedia) of DM terms
 * developing the methods and material for a Transition to Work program
 * applying psychological constructs to organizational DM including: Locus of Control, Attributional Style, Learned Helplessness, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Positive Psychology, Malingering (and co-malingering) and Disability Proneness
 * in-service training for company personnel to implement return to work strategies and vocational rehabilitation concepts in their human resource management protocol

Disability Proneness
Following the work of R.C. Behan and A. H. Hirschfeld who in the 1960s described the “accident process,” Walker constructed the concept of “disability proneness,” what is thought to be a real and significant phenomenon antecedent to and at times the cause of many cases of chronic vocational disability. Walker was influenced by the writing of M. R. Weinstein who viewed disability as a social process rather than a discrete medical outcome of disease or trauma. Walker was the first to argue that the workers’ compensation system of lost time often fosters learned helplessness and laziness, particularly for those individuals who are disability prone. Disability proneness is the result of complex psychosocial dynamics, including the individual’s explanatory style. In the context of these dynamics, particular individuals become permanently “disabled” by the very compensation system once designed to “make them whole.”

Injured Worker Helplessness
In the late 1980s, Walker constructed the concept of Injured Worker Helplessness and published a series of articles regarding the concept. Walker relied heavily on the work of Martin E. P. Seligman, who formulated the theory of Learned Helplessness and wrote two major books on the issue: Learned Helplessness and Learned Optimism.)

Walker found that a protracted stay in the lost time system of workers’ compensation (WC), for example, will produce “learned helplessness” in the worker/insurance claimant. Injured workers rather quickly learn that they are not in control of the WC system in which they have fallen. Moreover, they quickly discover that non-contingent reward is part of the quagmire in which they find themselves. Whether or not injured workers attend physical therapy, whether or not they even get out of bed, they receive lost-wage benefits, and as a result, in addition to learning “helplessness,” injured workers run the risk of learning “laziness.”

In his work with WC claimants, Walker identified the sources (relationships) leading to claimant’s disinterest in and even resistance to returning to work. The reluctance often derives from dynamics in any one or more of the following relationships:


 * employer - injured worker
 * physician - patient
 * claimant - insurance carrier
 * injured worker - his/her family
 * injured worker - rehabilitation specialist
 * injured worker - attorney

Transition-to-Work
The traditional methods by which employers dealt with employees who had been injured was either to ignore them, attempt to “vocationally rehabilitate” them to alternative employment outside the organization (usually through a private sector rehabilitation provider), or bring them back to the workplace with what was called a “Light Duty” approach. Under this method, employees were given less exertional “make work” assignments that occupied them until they were well enough to return to their jobs or until the benefits could be permanently modified.

The Transition-to-Work (TTW) is a process that involves the injured worker in a real work assignment but managed in incremental steps of duration and strength requirements. The steps are designed to increase over time with specific targets and achievement goals. Another important aspect of TTW is that the transition is planned and documented by a team of staff members responsible for the design and the implementation of the plan. Vocational assessment and rehabilitation become an integral part of the employer’s assistance to the injured worker.

Heffner and Walker developed the methods and materials for the TTW and have made them available to industry professionals through CEC Associates.

Publications

 * 1) 1. The New Worker

The New Worker is the oldest, longest running newsletter for those interested in human factors in the workplace, including rehabilitation professionals and employers. The newsletter is a quarterly that is published in paper and online through the CEC web site. A summary of each issue is created in hard copy and mailed to corporate clients. Each issue of The New Worker has a feature article on some vocational rehabilitation or disability management issue, as well as a number of shorter, summary pieces on timely workplace issues.


 * 1) 2. Selected Articles

Walker and his associates have published more than 100 articles related to Vocational Rehabilitation and Disability Management in the workplace. Among the many issues addressed are:


 * Disability Proneness
 * Human Resource Management of Disability Proneness
 * Understanding Vocational Testing
 * Explaining Acquired Disability
 * Forensic Vocational Testing
 * Managing Work Absences
 * The Distinction between Disability and Impairment
 * The Independent Medical Examination
 * The Use of Earning Power Assessments in Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation
 * Strategies for Reducing Workplace Injuries
 * Issues in Pain as a Disability
 * Back Problems: Specific Issues
 * Workers’ Compensation Reform Through Employer Involvement
 * The Right to Vocational Evaluation in Pennsylvania and the Federal Courts
 * Workers’ Compensation and the Learned Helplessness Paradigm
 * Using Positive Psychology in Workplace Disability Prevention and Management

Professional CEUs
Walker and CEC created online articles for rehabilitation professionals to earn their required Continuing Education Units (CEUs). The online availability of the articles makes it more convenient and cost-effective for those needing the CEUs. The articles deal with state-of-the-art professional issues and are developed in series format: as of 2009, there are 10 series, with each including approximately 5 separate articles. Some of the articles are specifically designed to meet the requirement for “Ethics” CEUs. Applicants for the CEUs read the article and answer questions related to the article. The answers are emailed to CEC and if the answers are satisfactory, CEC issues the assigned CEUs.

CEC is certified by three relevant commissions for the CEUs: the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification (CRCC), Commission for Case Manager Certification (CCMC), and the Certification of Disability Management Specialists Commission (CDMSC).

Related Links
http://www.cecassoc.com/ http://www.cecassoc.com/newsletters.htm http://www.cecassoc.blogspot.com/ Job Accommodation Network (JAN) http://www.jan.wvu.edu/ “How to Implement a Disability Management Program” www.wikihow.com/Implement-a-Disability-Management-Program “Disability Management Program” www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_Management_Program