Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

Depression, anxiety increase among injured workers: Medrisk

Reprints
Medrisk

Injured workers self-reporting anxiety and depression increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with numbers jumping “significantly” between 2019 and 2020 and not returning to pre-pandemic rates in 2022 as the pandemic waned, according to an industry trends report released Tuesday by Medrisk Inc.

In 2019, 24.4% of injured workers reported they had anxiety, 19.8% reported depression and 14.8 reported symptoms of both; and in 2022, 30% reported they had anxiety, 23.5% reported depression and 20.5% reported both, according to data compiled by Medrisk, which manages physical medicine services for injured workers.

The report also found that injured employees reporting anxiety and depression have a 7% higher utilization of physical therapy than those who did not report these conditions.

Other trends cited in the report pertained to aging and injured workers and a higher utilization of physical therapy: injured employees aged 56 and older have 21% more physical therapy visits than those aged 18 to 55; and injured employees aged 56 and older have a 31% longer duration of overall physical therapy treatment than those aged 18 to 55.