What does WorkCover do after you make a workcover claim?

When you make a workcover claim, WorkCover Queensland must decide very quickly if they accept or reject your claim. They usually follow the same process in every claim.

WorkCover contacts employer and makes a decision

WorkCover will contact your employer to briefly discuss your claim. They will ask how your incident occurred.  In other words, they will try to verify if the employer agrees with your description of the incident.

Once WorkCover has contacted your employer, and they have a work capacity certificate from your doctor, they can usually make a decision within 20 days, sometimes much faster.

Wage payments and normal weekly earnings

If you can’t work because of your injuries WorkCover will start paying your wages. The bad news is that they don’t pay all of it, and over time they decrease their payments.

The first step is to work out your normal weekly earnings. Your NWE is basically your wages, but it doesn’t include things like travel and meal allowance. It also doesn’t include super. They way in which WorkCover calculates your normal weekly earnings is fairly simple.  They get the employer to confirm your last 12 months’ of wages and they calculate your weekly average, less super and allowances. (In a nutshell). If you haven’t worked for the employer for at least 12 months, they will look at whatever earnings data is available.

For the first 26 weeks after your injury, you get 85% of your normal weekly earnings. This is reduced to 75% after 26 weeks.  After 2 years, this is reduced to a single pension rate unless you have a serious injury which could result in a 15% whole person impairment. The longest you can be on workcover is 5 years.

Medical bills and rehab/return to work

WorkCover will also start paying for the cost of your medical treatment. For example, your GP might refer you to specialists who undertake surgery or provide physiotherapy.  Usually, all these services must be pre-approved by WorkCover, but once that’s done, WorkCover funds 100% of the costs involved. Unlike with Medicare, where you might have to look for bulk billing practices, in a workcover claim, every medical service is provided in a private setting fully funded by WorkCover.

The other thing WorkCover will do after a while is figure out if you can return to work in some capacity. This might be reduced hours, modified (light) duties or a combination of both. If your employer doesn’t have a suitable position for light duties, then WorkCover might place you with a host employer on a temporary basis. This decision is based on medical advice and usually this won’t happen until at least a few months after your incident.

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.