Workers’ Compensation Risk Management Award Winner: Stater Bros. Markets

By CATERINA PONTORIERO

Imagine not only being in charge of the workers’ compensation program for 18,000 employees, but also being close enough to them that many aren't afraid to pick up the phone and call when they have a problem.

In six years as director of insurance administration at California-based supermarket chain Stater Bros. Markets, Tamara Ulufanua-Ciraulo has achieved exactly that level of intimacy with thousands of employees. Her success comes from knowing firsthand what kind of injuries workers can sustain: In 27 years with the company, she has worked in a variety of jobs within the chain, including pushing shopping carts, working as a courtesy clerk, becoming the first female meat division supervisor for the company and working within Stater Bros.’ marketing division. In her current role overseeing insurance, Ulufanua-Ciraulo has made it a priority to make sure all employees receive the proper training, treatment and care they deserve.

To hear Ulufanua-Ciraulo tell it, employees at Stater Bros. Markets aren't just employees: They’re family. So when she received the opportunity to take on managing the company's insurance, she used her background in education and as a mother of six children to make ground-breaking changes within Stater Bros.’ workers’ comp program that not only benefit the Stater Bros. family of employees, but also the company's bottom line.

Ulufanua-Ciraulo has helped Stater Bros. introduce training programs, take preventative measures to reduce the number of certain injuries, and implement a pharmacy and claims review program that has resulted in an enviable 71% slash in drug costs over a two-year period.

Learning From Experience
Ulufanua-Ciraulo started by enacting changes to Stater Bros.’ workers’ comp program that focus on education and injury prevention for all employees, whether they work at a checkout line at one of the chain's 168 stores or at the company's 2 million-acre warehouse/distribution center in San Bernadino, Calif.—which, she notes, is the largest single distribution center (under one roof) in the continental U.S.

Some changes have been as simple as requiring all employees who use knives in-store to wear a chain-link metal wire mesh glove on the hand opposite the one in which the knife is wielded. This measure has resulted in a serious reduction in cutting-related injuries, from approximately 200 per year to zero.

Ulufanua-Ciraulo knows firsthand what having that kind of protection means to an employee after experiencing a cut of her own that required 13 stitches — an experience that also opened her eyes to the need for a better review of company-accepted clinics. “I remember that when I went to the industrial clinic, I felt like I went to a vet's office,” she says.

Upon joining the insurance side, Ulufanua-Ciraulo implemented a clinic review system in which clinics are selected by qualities including customer service and cleanliness. “We have very high standards for our industrial clinics,” she says. “If your employees walk into a clean, well-run, nice clinic, they feel better already, and then they get the care that we want them to have.

“The care and the quality of the care that our people get is deeply important to us. We tell each other we’re family, so we better treat each other like we’re family.”

Education and Training
The most common injuries experienced at Stater Bros. are sprains and strains. “One of the biggest ways we try to combat that is to do an extensive amount of training,” says Ulufanua-Ciraulo. “But we don't just say, ‘Here, read this and sign this.’ We’re not big on read-and-sign.”

Instead, Ulufanua-Ciraulo and her colleague Steven Toscano, supervisor of support services, train more than 30 low-level managers known as “key carriers” on a rotation and customer service representatives, who handle the front end of the stores, monthly.

Within the company's eight districts, Ulufanua-Ciraulo and Toscano are “constantly making sure we are rotating through the districts and through the stores teaching and training,” she notes. “We have a one-on-one with at least three stores a week, and it's all specifically on [workers’] comp, liability and safety.”

All the training is paying off, too. According to Ulufanua-Ciraulo, positive results are seen in written feedback given by employees, the immediate improvement in operations and in the decline in reported injuries.

“Working in a grocery store, working in our warehouses, it is a physically demanding job,” she says. These jobs require heavy lifting, twisting, turning and standing for long periods of time each day.

With that in mind, Stater Bros. also introduced a program called “ICE PACK,” in which physical therapists are available onsite at its corporate campus to help employees with taping, wrapping and icing body parts to help them do their jobs more efficiently — even if the injury isn't work-related, or an actual “injury” at all.

“It could have been something that happened at work that I don't want to treat as workers’ comp, or it could be that I was pulling weeds in my backyard,” says Ulufanua-Ciraulo. “We try to make it very clear that the care is about [the employees] and it's free.

“Most of time an employee would have to pay a co-pay to spend time like that with a physical therapist,” she adds. “It's all about keeping them healthy and keeping them happy.”

Claims Review Cuts Costs
The aforementioned 71% reduction in drug costs began with a claims-review process. Ulufanua-Ciraulo reviewed the bigger cases of prescription drug use to identify problems, meeting with many of the providers located within a 30-mile radius of the Stater Bros. corporate office and talking to pain-management doctors to find alternatives to prescribing so many drugs that employees often weren't even taking. She cites one case in which they found an employee was being prescribed an exorbitant amount of medication that they couldn't possibly be ingesting.

“The person was being dispensed 372 Vicodin for a 30-day period. I thought, ‘How is that even physically possible?’” she explains. “It's not safe, and there's so many things wrong here: You’ve got a provider issue, you’ve got a payment issue. And, I’m not a fan of trying to kill anybody with medication. We have to do what's right.”

That effort has paid dividends: Working together with Sedgwick, Ulufanua-Ciraulo's Workers’ Comp team has reduced Stater Bros.’ prescription drug costs $1,070,071 over a two-year period.

Dedicated Oversight
Additionally, Stater Bros. maintains a partnership forged with The Hartford more than a decade ago in which four of its former employees currently work for the carrier and help maintain and monitor the supermarket chain's loss-prevention and safety programs. Internally, they are known as the Risk Engineer Consultant Team.

“It is unique to our business model,” says Ulufanua-Ciraulo. “We wanted a dedicated team to have independent oversight and involvement with our employees. They bring with them intimate firsthand knowledge of being a Stater Bros. employee.

“This is such a key component because the representatives have firsthand working knowledge of our job activities,” she continues. “Many of them have either worked in the retail stores or in our distribution center, so they actually have performed the jobs that they now help to make safer.”

The team performs store-safety audits; training in CPR, food-safety instruction, power equipment and hazardous materials recognition, among other areas; and conducts ergonomic assessments—which saves money that would otherwise be spent on an outside firm to perform them.

“They’re dedicated consultants who our employees trust and have built relationships with, which helps to build and reinforce a culture of safety,” Ulufanua-Ciraulo says. “We determined that even if you have [outside] loss-prevention professionals, no matter how well-trained or how exceptional they were, until they understood our business and our body mechanics it was more difficult for them to help us than not.

“When you have that consistency,” she adds, “you’re continually building a proactive program, instead of just monitoring it or reacting to accidents.”

Each year, NU's Excellence in Workers’ Compensation Risk Management Award is bestowed upon three organizations with notably successful loss- control, safety and return-to-work programs. They are among the top performers in managing workers’ compensation, all of them with unique success stories to share. The 2016 award is co-sponsored by Safety National and Sedgwick. The winners will present information on their programs at the 71st annual Workers Compensation Educational Conference in Orlando August 21-24.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caterina Pontoriero, associate online features editor at PropertyCasualty360.com, conceptualizes and edits multimedia including videos, slideshows, and articles for PropertyCasualty360.com. Prior to joining National Underwriter Property & Casualty in 2012, Caterina worked with RIS News and The Italian Tribune Newspaper. Caterina is a graduate of Montclair State University with a B.A. in English and concentration in journalism. Connect with Caterina on LinkedIn, Facebook and @PC360_Risk.