TAWAU: The Sabah Social Security Organisation (SOCSO) will soon have a smart partnership with all hospitals throughout the State to carry out the 5M (Mengesan, Memulihkan, Memasimumkan, Mengurangkan, Mempercepatkan) project.
The 5M concept encourages employees to go back to work as soon as possible although they are suffering from an illness or injury.
Disclosing this here yesterday, SOCSO case manager Mustapa Umar said the 5M project is still at a discussion level.
The State SOCSO had discussed the matter at the management level with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kota Kinabalu recently and it is hoped that it will be implemented in early November, this year.
They had used five to 10 cases for this study in Kota Kinabalu before extending the concept to the other districts, Mustapa said.
He said the project aims to protect the social and economic aspects of the employees as well as to encourage them to go back to work although they are using wheelchairs.
“We wish to carry out earlier intervention programme and tackle it earlier to allow the employees (patients or victims) to go back to work in a short period of time, rather than stay at home.
“Thus, we need to work tightly with the hospitals and get any information from them for our investigation before we could distribute the compensation claims earlier to the employees. We would be proactive in carrying out such project.
“Such a project has been implemented in foreign countries and if it is succeeds, Sabah is the first state in Malaysia to implement it. Thus, we would interact with the hospitals and seek suitable methods to implement it,” said Mustapa at a press conference here yesterday.
According to him, a ‘Return to work’ project was implemented in Klang in 2005 and January 2010 in Sabah.
As the government is discouraging employees to just sit at home without returning to work immediately, it is important to tackle such ‘sitting at home’ culture by implementing the spirit of returning to work as soon as possible.
Mustapa also disclosed that the 5M project encourages employers to hire people with disabilities and support the concept of returning to work immediately.