Unit 4 Annotated Bibliography: In Unit VI of this course, you will be tasked with writing about the dispute process when workers believe that they are treated unjustly. For this assignment, research and solid references need to be found within the Waldorf

Course Description Examines the fundamentals of workers’ compensation including the history and legal aspects of state workers’ compensation systems, workers’ rights, claims management, reporting and recording requirements, and various types of coverage available to employers. Course Textbook(s) Boggs, C. J. (2021). The insurance professional's practical guide to workers' compensation: From history through audit (3rd ed.). Wells Media Group. Course Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this course, students should be able to: 1. Describe the history of the workers' compensation system in the United States. 2. Examine fundamental laws common to state workers' compensation systems. 3. Discuss workers' rights and responsibilities under the majority of state workers' compensation systems. 4. Examine different types of coverage available to employers. 5. Discuss fundamentals of claims management, including identification and classification of compensable injuries and illnesses. 6. Explain state workers' compensation record-keeping systems and reporting requirements. 7. Apply workers' compensation management regulations and concepts to workplace scenarios. Academic Integrity Honesty and integrity are taken very seriously at Waldorf University. All students should be familiar with the Waldorf University Academic Integrity Policy (found in the current Student Handbook) and the consequences that will result from breaches of this policy. Credits Upon completion of this course, the students will earn 3.00 hours of college credit. Course Structure OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation 1 1. StudyGuide:Course units contain a Study Guide that provides students with the learning outcomes, unit lesson, required unit resources, assignments, and supplemental resources. 2. Learning Outcomes: Each unit contains Learning Outcomes that specify the measurable skills and knowledge students should gain upon completion of the unit. 3. Unit Lesson:Unit Lessons, which are located in the Study Guide, discuss lesson material. 4. Required Unit Resources:Units contain Required Unit Resources from one or more chapters from the textbook and/or outside resources. 5. Discussion Boards: Students are required to submit Discussion Board posts in Units I-VIII. Discussion Boards provide students the opportunity for student-to-student and professor-to-student interaction based on relevant course concepts and ideas. Specific information about accessing the Discussion Board rubric is provided below. 6. Unit Assessments: This course contains Unit Assessments, which test student knowledge on important aspects of the course. These tests may come in many different forms, ranging from multiple choice to written response questions. 7. Unit Assignments: Students are required to submit for grading Unit Assignments. Specific information and instructions regarding these assignments are provided below. Grading rubrics are included with each assignment. Specific information about accessing these rubrics is provided below. 8. Ask the Professor: This communication forum provides students with an opportunity to ask their professor general questions or questions related to course content. 9. Student Break Room: This communication forum allows for casual conversation with other classmates. Unit Assignments Unit II PowerPoint Presentation You are a human resources manager, and you have been asked to make a presentation to help employees understand how workers’ compensation works and their rights under the law. Create a presentation on workers’ compensation rights for the specific state in which you live or work. Be sure to include the items below in your presentation. Define the mission statement or values that guide the specific state workers’ compensation board/office. Identify whether or not the state has developed a model return-to-work program for employers to follow with their business. Discuss temporary total disability (TTD) and temporary partial disability (TPD) benefits for maximum weekly compensation. Discuss workers’ rights and responsibilities under the state’s compensation system and how this compares to other states. Report any resources that could be beneficial to employers such as risk reduction instructions or links to the safety and health division for the state. Indicate the process for workers’ compensation appeals. Your presentation must be a minimum of eight slides. (cover and reference slides do not count in the minimum slide count). You must use a minimum of two sources, which may include your textbook. Adhere to APA Style when creating citations and references for this assignment. APA formatting, however, is not necessary If necessary, you may also use the slide notes function to explain slide contents, but this is not required. Unit III Research Paper Apply workers’ compensation management regulations and concepts to the following workplace scenario: You are a newly hired environmental safety and health professional for a midsized manufacturer of widgets. You currently have three manufacturing facilities in three separate, but geographically close states. Because of unprecedented growth in the widgets market, your company decides to build another factory. One out of the hundreds of indicators the executive staff is looking for is which one of their current states they operate is most employer friendly. In other words, which state treats employers and employees the same when it comes to regulatory requirements? Complete a research paper that compares and contrasts the differences between the state in which you live and two other adjacent states. In your paper, you should discuss the differences and similarities between workers’ rights in the three different states (e.g., definition of employee, wages paid, weeks of temporary disability, etc.), identify and explain the commonalities in the fundamental laws of the workers’ compensation system in the three states, OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation 2 interpret the resources that are available for employers in each state (e.g., monthly courses taught, written guidance, employer rights, etc.), discuss the types of coverage available to employees in each state, and argue which state is more employer friendly from an employer’s perspective when it comes to administering a workers’ compensation program. Be sure to use the tools provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Federal Employees’ Compensation (DFEC) State Workers’ Compensation Officials web page. This page provides a link to the workers’ compensation board for each of the 50 states as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. In addition to this resource, you should use a minimum of two other sources. All information from these sources must be cited in APA style. This research paper must be a minimum of three pages in length. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Please note that no abstract is needed. The title and reference page are not included in the page count. Unit IVAnnotated Bibliography In Unit VI of this course, you will be tasked with writing about the dispute process when workers believe that they are treated unjustly. For this assignment, research and solid references need to be found within the Waldorf Online Library. For this assignment, you will be creating an annotated bibliography of resources on the dispute process. The resources you identify in this bibliography will be used in writing your assignment in Unit VI. By locating the necessary resources in this bibliography, you will be prepared to write your paper in Unit VI. Generally, a workers’ compensation dispute is a disagreement between the system participants (e.g., the injured worker, the employer, the employer’s insurance company) that must be settled by the state-specific workers’ compensation board. Most (but not all) disputes generally involve three main areas: an indemnity dispute involving compensability or liability, a medical fee dispute for healthcare already provided where the payment has been reduced or denied, or a medical necessity dispute, disputing if a medical procedure is actually medically necessary. Using these common disputes as well as others, create an annotated bibliography, and show how those resources will support your paper by briefly describing the content of each article or referenced source. When writing your bibliography, think about the different types of coverage available to employees and the fundamentals of claim management. Be sure to include information about these in your bibliography. There is no minimum page count for this assignment, but you must include six-to-ten sources in your bibliography and your entry for each reference should be at least 250 words. Each source should be from the Waldorf Online Library, and the assignment should be formatted in APA style. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Click the Annotated Bibliography example for more help. Unit VPowerPoint Presentation You are the safety manager for a company that produces widgets in the state of Kentucky. Your business has a solid reputation and is growing and looking to expand to Texas and Georgia in the next few years. The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) wants a better understanding of what insurance coverage they need to have for workers’ compensation moving forward in these three states. You have partnered with the workers’ compensation manager, and you want to give the SLT a feel for how much money they have spent the past few years and what they should consider for future workers’ compensation insurance coverage. Using information you have learned thus far in the course, make a proposal to the SLT on items they should consider, based on fairly hard facts. Do this by using the OSHA "Safety Pays" Program. Last year, your company had 12 sprains, four cases of carpal tunnel syndrome, one crushing incident, and the loss of vision for three employees. Your company also has a 6.7% profit margin. Your company pays the first $100,000 aggregate for each category of injuries, and then the insurance company pays the rest. Use the data displayed above, create slides that discuss the following: Discuss how many compensable injuries happened last year. Explain how many incidents and how much and what could happen if the workforce doubled. Estimate the total direct costs, indirect costs, and the amount of sales of widgets that are needed to cover the total cost OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation 3 of all the company accidents. Provide guidance on which states should be considered 3A states and 3C states in the workers’ compensation insurance policy. Identify if these projected three states would practice extraterritorial and reciprocity with the main state, and explain to the SLT the impact of these statutory guidelines. Determine if the employer would need any other extra insurance (insurance that would cover a workplace accident not covered by workers’ compensation) or if they should they just pay out of pocket. Your PowerPoint presentation must be a minimum of eight slides, not counting the title slide or references slides. You must use a minimum of two resources (including the OSHA Safety Pays website) for your presentation. You should include a combination of text and diagrams and pictures if they add value. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Unit VI Essay Workers’ compensation is the only means for workers to be able to support their families monetarily during the time of injury, which sometimes may be for a few months to a few years. Many workers across America have had a negative, perhaps even slightly hostile, experience with workers’ compensation and have had the need to dispute certain aspects such as compensation, medical bill payment, and level of disability rating among other issues. For this assignment, write an essay describing the benefit of the dispute process for the state that you live and/or work in. Think about these questions when writing your essay: Why is the dispute process even needed? What are common causes of injured workers disputing the level of benefits or compensation? What are the workers’ rights and responsibilities when dealing with disputes? What is the root cause of disputes? Is it a basic viewpoint of the accident situation in general, or is it a lack of communication, or inaccurate communication between many different groups? How does the dispute process fit into the claims management process? Your essay should be a minimum of four pages. At a minimum, the resources you identified in your Unit IV Annotated Bibliography should be used in your paper. The annotated bibliography itself will not be included as a part of the assignment, just the resources you identified. A minimum of three sources must be used. All sources used, including your textbook, must be cited and referenced following APA guidelines, and your essay should be formatted in APA style to include a title page and reference page. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. NOTE: Much of the dispute process may be reviewed on your state’s web page. Remember, the assignment is to show the perceived benefits of the dispute process, not the actual description or purpose of the process. Unit VII PowerPoint Presentation Many times the workers’ compensation coordinator is somewhere far away in another state, at the corporate office, or may even be a contracted service. For this exercise, your corporate office is located in Chicago, Il and you have a factory that is located in Oregon and another in Washington. The EH&S Manager is the most knowledgeable individual in the plant with regard to workers’ compensation and safety and health issues. With these variables in mind, develop a PowerPoint for important aspects of workers’ compensation that front line supervisors’ need to understand. The assignment is flexible so that you may choose what you feel is most important to the supervisors of the company, but the following questions should be answered: What are the key points every supervisor should know about the company’s workers’ compensation program or laws? What are the employees entitled to if they were to lose use of a limb, eye, or ability to work? What if a company employee is brought in from another state? What is an EMR, and how is it affected by incidents? What are some of the different types of coverage available? What are the record-keeping systems and reporting requirements? Your PowerPoint presentation must be a minimum of 12 slides. Ensure the PowerPoint presentation has a title slide, an outline of topics to be discussed, and a reference slide at the end of the presentation. These slides do not count toward the 12-slide minimum. You must use a minimum of two resources in your presentation. Adhere to APA Style when constructing OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation 4 this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Unit VIII ScholarlyActivity Argumentative Paper The state workers’ compensation board that governs workers’ compensation for the state that your company resides and performs all of its business in, has decided to reject the four exceptions to the governing classification and single enterprise rule in your state. Understanding this is a very big issue, your company’s legal team has elicited your help to write an argumentative paper that will be presented to the workers’ compensation board during the public hearings scheduled for next week. Compose a paper that defends the following list: 1. the Standard Exception classifications, 2. the Interchange of Labor rules, 3. the General Exclusion classes, and 4. the use of the Multiple Enterprise rule. The legal department is depending on you to ensure that to help the board understand why the rejection of these exceptions would be so detrimental to your business. Make sure you argue your points based on a company with 8,000-plus employees, within seven different manufacturing sites and two major administrative buildings that are separated geographically from the plants. Your EMR for the trailing 36-month period is 0.94 and the gross revenue for your company is $1.3 billion. Your paper must be a minimum of three pages (not including the title and reference page) and include at least two academic resources. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Please include an abstract that summarizes the key points of your defense and/or argument. Submitting Course Papers/Projects Once you have completed your papers/projects, submit your completed papers/projects by uploading through the Assignment tab in each unit. Do not e-mail your paper directly to your professor. By using the Assignment tab, your record will automatically be updated to indicate you have submitted your papers/projects, and the assignment will be provided to your professor for grading. Instructions for submitting your assignment can be found under the Assignment tab in each unit. APA Guidelines Waldorf University requires that students use the APA style for papers and projects. Therefore, the APA rules for formatting, quoting, paraphrasing, citing, and listing of sources are to be followed. Information about using APA style can be found in APA Style Help in the Course Menu. This area provides links to Internet sites, tutorials, and guides that provide comprehensive information on APA formatting, including examples and sample papers. Grading Rubrics This course utilizes analytic grading rubrics as tools for your professor in assigning grades for all learning activities. Each rubric serves as a guide that communicates the expectations of the learning activity and describes the criteria for each level of achievement. In addition, a rubric is a reference tool that lists evaluation criteria and can help you organize your efforts to meet the requirements of that learning activity. It is imperative for you to familiarize yourself with these rubrics because these are the primary tools your professor uses for assessing learning activities. Rubric categories include (1) Discussion Board, (2) Assessment (Written Response), and (3) Assignment. However, it is possible that not all of the listed rubric types will be used in a single course (e.g., some courses may not have Assessments). The Discussion Board rubric can be found within Unit I’s Discussion Board submission instructions. OSH 3303, Workers' Compensation 5 The Assessment (Written Response) rubric can be found embedded in a link within the directions for each Unit Assessment. However, these rubrics will only be used when written-response questions appear within the Assessment. Each Assignment type (e.g., article critique, case study, research paper) will have its own rubric. The Assignment rubrics are built into Blackboard, allowing students to review them prior to beginning the Assignment and again once the Assignment has been scored. This rubric can be accessed via the Assignment link located within the unit where it is to be submitted. Students may also access the rubric through the course menu by selecting the “Grades” link. Again, it is vitallyimportant for you to become familiar with these rubrics because their application to your Discussion Boards, Assessments, and Assignments is the method bywhich your instructor assigns all grades. Communication Forums These are non-graded discussion forums that allow you to communicate with your professor and other students. Participation in these discussion forums is encouraged, but not required. You can access these forums with the buttons in the Course Menu. Instructions for subscribing/unsubscribing to these forums are provided below. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe/unsubscribe and post to the Communication Forums. Ask the Professor This communication forum provides you with an opportunity to ask your professor general or course content questions. Questions may focus on Blackboard locations of online course components, textbook or course content elaboration, additional guidance on assessment requirements, or general advice from other students. Questions that are specific in nature, such as inquiries regarding assessment/assignment grades or personal accommodation requests, are NOT to be posted on this forum. If you have questions, comments, or concerns of a non- public nature, please feel free to email your professor. Responses to your post will be addressed or emailed by the professor within 48 hours. Before posting, please ensure that you have read all relevant course documentation, including the syllabus, assessment/assignment instructions, faculty feedback, and other important information. Student Break Room This communication forum allows for casual conversation with your classmates. Communication on this forum should always maintain a standard of appropriateness and respect for your fellow classmates. This forum should NOT be used to share assessment answers.