The smooth operation of return to work and workers’ compensation brings a myriad of challenges, which come in two varieties: those appearing across the board, and those particular to a business’s size.

“Smaller businesses often don’t understand the workers’ compensation system at all,” explained Tracey Browne, who has been the Manager of the National OHS Policy and Membership Services at the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group).

Small businesses may have never had to deal with a workers’ compensation claim before and can feel like it’s “a bit of a black hole” said Ms Browne. “With small business we’re pretty much starting at ground level a lot of the time.”

Firstly, the workers’ compensation system needs to be explained: what to expect, in what time, what forms to fill in, legal obligations and how to meet them, and then misconceptions that might influence attitudes towards injury need to be corrected. “In a lot of cases we’ve got to get past that initial barrier of, ‘I shouldn’t have to worry about this claim because work wasn’t what caused it; it’s because they’re old, because they played football, because they’re a body builder’. We’ve got to get them past that first.”

Larger businesses, however, understand the scheme and can launch straight into the return to work process. Multinationals and other larger companies have in-house experts to deal with workers’ compensation. Challenges that arise here tend to be systemic issues.

But bigger companies can have bigger problems, too. “In large business one of the challenges is that sometimes you can have so many people involved that the message about someone being injured and the need for return to work doesn’t get to people who need to do it.”

In companies of up to 200 or 500 employees, Ms Browne said the person responsible for workers’ compensation might also have a number of other responsibilities, and supervisors mightn’t understand the importance of letting people know that someone’s has left work with an injury. “I think that it’s the communication between various parts of the organisation that’s probably the hardest. In the smaller business the office manager is going to know that somebody’s gone home with a back injury. They mightn’t know what to do about it, but they will know that it’s happened,” Ms Browne said.

Consistently problematic across businesses of all sizes is translating information from doctors into helpful advice for the workplace and the worker, and “particularly getting doctors to understand that coming back to work is part of the solution, not something that is going to slow down the recovery process.”

One of the biggest messages the Ai Group espouses is for employers to approach every case like it’s legitimate – because usually it will be – and to focus on return to work while being a supportive source of information for the worker.

“The employer should be the one who tells the worker: these are your entitlements, this is how it’s going to get processed, this is what you need to do, here are the forms to fill in, how can we help you and what can we do to assist you – so that the worker is feeling that we are looking after them,” said Ms Browne. “For most people we are talking about legitimate claims and legitimate issues, and we really need to be supporting them.”

She says respecting and supporting the worker and their injury pays off – even in the rare cases in which the worker’s situation is questionable.

“We just need to get on and manage [the injury] and support the worker in the process. The advantage of that for somebody who has a legitimate injury is that they will feel cared for.  In the minority of cases where things may not be quite as above board as we’d like them to be, all the things that we do to support a worker with a genuine issue will also minimise the risk that the minority might take advantage of the situation. The employer is in contact, supporting them and looking at opportunities for them to come back to work – they’re going to find it’s easier to come back to work than to take advantage of the system.”

Ms Browne said if she could make a change to the return to work and workers’ compensation systems she’d like to see one national set of legislation. Businesses with operations in every state trying to manage different obligations and different terminologies “spend a lot of time trying to understand what the legislation requires them to do, when they should actually be focusing on the process of getting someone back to work,” she said.

She also believes the return to work system lacks the right incentives for doctors to get more involved and communicate better with workplaces. “Communication breakdown is one of the biggest problems in return to work,” she said.

Ms Browne would like to see a more coordinated approach to return to work, whereby doctors have the right incentives to communicate better with workplaces, and the RTW coordinator, supervisor, team members and injured worker can all communicate positively about what solutions can be found for a successful return to work.