The System That Was Supposed to Help Me - June 2022

2–7 June 2022

By June 2022, nearly three years had passed since I reported an unsafe workplace.

Instead of recovery, I found myself explaining the same story over and over again.

On 2 June 2022, my solicitor asked what appeared to be straightforward questions arising from the Personal Injury Commission determination of 12 July 2021:

• Had I been working after that date?
• What did I understand about the agreement regarding weekly payments?
• Had my condition deteriorated?

Simple questions.

Impossible answers.

Because the reality could not be explained in a few sentences.

I tried.

But every answer became another attempt to explain what had happened after my workers compensation claim was lodged.

I wasn’t simply describing psychological injuries from severe employer retaliation for requesting a safe work environment anymore.

I was describing what were years of harm caused by systemic failures.

I explained that the purpose of lodging my claim in May 2020 had always been to recover and return safely to the job I loved.

Instead, I described what happened after my claim:

• the Injury Management Plan that was never implemented;
• the disappearance of my case manager;
• the absence of coordinated return-to-work support;
• repeated traumatic & adversarial “independent” medical examinations;
• years without the rehabilitation that workers compensation legislation is supposed to provide.

The further I was kept away from my work, the more I deteriorated.

I wrote that workers compensation is supposed to pay people while they recover, not years later after the damage has already been done.

That sentence summed up everything.

The injury wasn’t standing still.

Every month of delay became another injury.

⸻ 

I also explained something that had become painfully obvious.

Financial pressure changes everything.

The back payment eventually agreed by the Commission did not undo what had already happened.

By then I had exhausted leave, depleted savings and was drawing on my own superannuation simply to survive.

A very small portion of back-payments arrived long after they were supposed to support recovery.

Recovery cannot be back-paid.

That’s NOT the purpose of a workers compensation statutory scheme! 

A worker is meant to be compensated at the same time as they recover and return to their work! 

Surely Catholic Church Insurance, ACU, SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW know this!!! 

⸻

Over those emails, I repeatedly returned to one goal.

I wanted to go back to my work.

Again and again I wrote the same words in different ways:

• I wanted the Injury Management Plan implemented.
• I wanted cooperation between the insurer, employer and my treating practitioners.
• I wanted to recover in my job.
• I wanted the employer abuse to stop.

That was all.

⸻

On 3 June 2022, another letter arrived.

Turks Legal stepped in yet again, on behalf of Catholic Church Insurance, to arrange yet another Independent Medical Examination! 

BUT THERE HAD NEVER BEEN ANY CONTACT WITH MY OWN NOMINATED TREATING DOCTOR!

WTF! 

This would be another assessment by Olivia Lee (same person CCI coerced me to see on 31 March 2021 - we start to see which practitioners give insurers what they want, not what the truth actually is, especially for someone who will recover by RETURNING TO THEIR WORK). 

This was scheduled via telehealth for 24 June 2022. The letter warned that failure to attend could result in suspension of compensation entitlements.

Catholic Church Insurance had never paid me my legally owed compensation entitlements, at the same time as NOT co-operating to implement their own agreed injury management plan!!! 

CCI breached their own contractual obligations with me!

Re-read this post, with evidence of the legally binding injury management plan agreement - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/06/injury-management-plan-legally-binding.html

But SIRA NSW and IRO funded workers compensation solicitors allow it! 

This was a desperate attempt to avoid contacting my NTD, avoid injury management obligations and return to work compliance again!

I experienced these “IME” appointments as another source of trauma, fear and justified distrust. 

Here is one example of multiple previous posts as to why - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-doctor-who-commits-fraud-2019.html - and this follow-up doozy sprung onto me almost a year later - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/08/proof-of-medical-fraud-october-2020.html

I had already described previous IMEs as deeply distressing.

Instead of feeling supported by the system, I was coerced to prepare for another “examination” while still waiting for the rehabilitation that should have begun years earlier.

Why did the now workers’ compensation solicitor #2, not challenge this!?

⸻

A few days later, on 7 June 2022, I wrote another email.

It was short.

I explained that I struggled even to say the words because they were so traumatic.

I said that what happened had been severely unlawful. I also explained that I had repeatedly attempted to have the Injury Management Plan implemented while seeking protection from the conduct that had caused my greater injury. 

This was deliberate sabotage and a continuation of diabolical and aggressive adverse action.

Even then, I was still trying to explain that everything I had done was directed toward one outcome:

Recovering safely.

Returning to my work.

⸻

What stands out most in these documents is so much exhaustion.

By June 2022 I was no longer asking people to believe me.

I was begging people to understand that workers compensation is supposed to stop injuries becoming worse.

Instead, the process itself had become one of the greatest sources of harm.

That is the tragedy I see when I read these emails.

Not simply that I was injured.

But that the system designed to help me recover had become the very thing that made me feel unsafe and that I was trying to survive.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 351-352.