Making a workcover claim in Queensland: Injury reporting

If you suffer injury at work, you can (and should) make a workcover claim. The first step in the process is injury reporting. Understanding where to go, what to report and what documents to obtain will help you not just at the start, but also later on if you want to bring a common law damages claim.

Step 1: Medical treatment and Work Capacity Certificate

This goes without saying. The first thing you should do after an injury is get medical treatment from a GP or at a hospital. When you are able to, ask the doctor to complete a document called a Work Capacity Certificate. This is basically a medical certificate, but specifically designed for Queensland workcover claims. Without a Work Capacity Certificate you will not be able to start the claim process.

The key thing to keep in mind is to tell your doctor about each and every injury you have suffered and all your symptoms – no matter how minor. Why is this important? Because the doctor will list these on the Work Capacity Certificate. When WorkCover decides what injuries you suffered in your work incident, they rely on the Work Capacity Certificate. And once WorkCover accepts that you suffered a particular injury in your work incident, they will fund treatment for it.

Sometimes, a doctor will note down an injury as a “provisional diagnosis”. This may especially be so in psychological injuries – for example PTSD. That’s ok, this just means that further testing or medical investigations will be carried out later to confirm the diagnosis.

Report injury to employer

Report your injury to your employer as soon as possible. Try and do this in writing. Best thing to do is to contact your supervisor, and ask for an incident reporting form. If they don’t have one, you could send an email to them about your injury.

What should you report? The incident date, time and place. Then a description of how it happened, followed by a summary of your injuries and symptoms.

A word of warning: out of loyalty to your employer, you might be tempted to say in your report that the incident was not anyone’s fault, or that it was “probably” your fault. It’s best not to do this. The point of an incident report is to record what happened, not the why – that can be figured out later by others.

Another word of warning: sometimes people tend to downplay the severity of their injuries of symptoms. Don’t do that. Often when an injury happens, initially there is an adrenalin rush and you don’t realise until after a few days or even weeks just how bad the injuries really are.

Make a workcover claim (on time)

Now make a WorkCover claim. You can contact WorkCover Queensland on the phone or online and make a claim. If your employer is self-insured, then contact your supervisor and find out who is the relevant contact to make a workers’ compensation claim.

When you make the claim, the most important thing is to be consistent in your reporting. Your description of the injury should be the same (in content) as what you reported to the employer.

Please note there are important deadlines to make a claim, and missing the deadlines can be fatal.

25% Cap on legal costs

In all of our personal injury compensation matters, we act on a No Win – No Fee basis. What that means is, there’s no upfront cost to you.

In Queensland, most compensation firms will charge you 50% of your compensation amount – the maximum allowed at law. This is very expensive. Our fee is different. We will cap our fee at 25% . Remember also, these are the maximum fees we will charge. If our fee in your claim is less, then we charge the lesser amount.

Before you engage us, we will provide you a written Disclosure Notice and a Client Service Agreement. These documents set out in detail the service we provide, as well as our fees and outlays. Before you sign anything, you can take these documents home with you, and study them with your family. You can take as long as you need, there is never any pressure from us. If anything in these documents doesn’t make sense to you, we can discuss it with you and you are free to ask another lawyer to give you advice. And remember, no win – no fee agreements come with a 5 day cooling off period for extra peace of mind.