Areas of Practice

Forensic/Expert Services

 

Vocational experts (VEs) are rehabilitation professionals who testify in court matters about a person's capacities to perform competitive employment following the onset of injury or illness. Vocational experts inform the court of how an injury or disease causes changes in a person's occupational potential and earning capacity.

A rehabilitation professional serving as a VE is generally trained as a counselor or psychologist, skilled in vocational assessment and/or job analysis and placement, and customarily certified by one or more relevant professional associations, such as the American Board of Vocational Experts. Vocational experts are the only rehabilitation professionals who are specifically trained to evaluate an injured person's post-injury occupational disability and employability.

Forensic vocational or disability evaluation does not involve a helping relationship between the VE and the injured party. It consists of the VE executing an independent review of pertinent medical information (including an understanding of the injured person's functionality), a clinical interview, preferably vocational testing (i.e., aptitudes and interests), and a resultant assessment of the injured person's transferable skills and residual employability.

In formulating an analysis of residual employability, the VE relies on medical documentation about the injured person's impairment(s) and residual functional capacity (RFC) or what the impaired person is able to do physically and/or mentally despite the medically defined impairment. In vocational disability evaluation, the RFC report bridges the gap between the existence of medical impairment and the assessment of occupational disability and residual employability.

Disability Management

Working in the role of Return-to-Work (RTW) Coordinator, McNabb Rehabilitation Services and its team of Disability Management Professionals facilitate the reintegration of workers who have been injured on or off the job or workers having a disability through illness.

A critical component of the RTW Coordinator’s function is to promote the values of return-to-work, disability management, and human rights within the organization.

The RTW Coordinator may act as a return-to-work advocate, challenging barriers to reintegration, protecting the worker's employability, and helping ensure there is no discrimination in the workplace while maintaining a cooperative working relationship with labor and management.

These multiple roles and functions of RTW Coordinators require appropriate knowledge and skills, which include coordination and monitoring of medical and rehabilitation services; development of disability management planning and case coordination activities among employees, managers/supervisors, labor representatives, human resource personnel, treating physicians, and therapists; development of transitional duty return to work plans; facilitating employee and physician understanding of return-to-work options; coordination of independent medical examinations and functional capacity evaluations; securing job analysis information for examining physicians to understand the type of work the employee can perform and; completion of vocational assessments to determine accommodation needs and transferable skills to perform alternate work. 

Workers Compensation

 

When an employee has suffered an injury that prevents the employee from earning wages equal to wages earned before the injury, the employee is entitled to vocational rehabilitation services. A licensed professional vocational rehabilitation counselor provides these services intended to return the worker with a disability to work, with a minimum of retraining, as soon as possible after an injury occurs.

Life Care Planning

 

Individuals who sustain devastating injuries or experience chronic healthcare problems are often confronted with significant medical, financial, social, and caregiving challenges. These challenges may come as a shock due to the lack of ability to manage the costs and needs of having a disabling condition.

One method of determining the necessary lifetime medical and rehabilitative needs and associated costs with managing a catastrophic injury or illness is developing a life care plan (LCP). 

Life care planners are often utilized in a forensic setting when disability-related lifetime needs and associated costs must be determined. In a forensic setting, these costs are considered part of the overall economic damages that can make up a significant portion of the total damages in a case.

Wrongful Death

 

The vocational expert in a wrongful death case assesses the decedent’s career prospects and potential earnings and provides insight into the financial losses suffered as a result of the decedent’s absence from their chosen profession. Additionally, the vocational expert quantifies the value of the decedent’s financial assistance, which the family would have benefitted from if their loved one hadn’t passed away, thus helping the family obtain compensation for long-term needs.

Divorce Proceedings

 

When a marriage dissolves, the separating couple, who previously made decisions jointly and privately, now must involve many others in their decision-making: attorneys, family law

judges, and commissioners, and possibly therapists, mediators, and retained expert witnesses may all weigh in on how the pair will conduct themselves in their new and separate lives.

One major decision in divorce is the level and duration of financial support required from the spouse with more resources. This is a family law decision in which vocational rehabilitation experts can provide useful information.

The vocational expert’s primary function is to help the couple and their attorneys understand the earning potential of one or both spouses.