When Legal Correspondence Becomes Another Source of Trauma - October 2022

On 17 October 2022, I received correspondence from my now second workers’ compensation solicitor.

My immediate response said everything:

“Seriously I feel like vomiting from trauma every time I get a letter from a solicitor.”

That wasn’t an exaggeration. By then, correspondence from lawyers had itself become a trauma trigger. I had repeatedly been forced to explain a situation that, at its core, wasn’t complicated.

I wanted a safe work environment.

I wanted the agreed Injury Management Plan implemented.

I wanted the employer and insurer required to comply with their statutory obligations. 

Instead, I had been passed between employment and workers’ compensation lawyers while regulators and legal processes divided my experience into disconnected legal categories. Nobody appeared willing to confront the central failure: laws and regulations may exist on paper, but what protection do they provide when compliance isn’t enforced?

The letter asked me to read lengthy workers’ compensation advice “carefully”. My handwritten response on the document recorded what that demand felt like:

“I’m supposed to read this carefully all alone with no support, after so much trauma and failure, solicitors included.”

I also wrote:

“ALL I ASKED FOR WAS A SAFE WORK ENVIRONMENT.”

Enclosed with the correspondence was the report by Nicholas Glozier from October 2021, the Medical Assessor appointed through the Personal Injury Commission. I haven’t read that report. I have protected myself from reading it because of the serious emotional, professional and financial harm associated with that “assessment” and the “process” surrounding it.

Simply sending that report to me, without trauma-informed support, or any apparent appreciation of its potential impact after what it did to me demonstrated another failure to understand what injured workers may already have endured.

During the assessment, this assessor denied me the safeguard of having a support person present to support me, take notes and witness what occurred. I’ll address that experience separately, together with the Personal Injury Commission’s information about safeguards and rights during IMEs and my complaint to the Health Care Complaints Commission.

This isn’t merely about whether compensation was available under one narrow part of the scheme. It’s about why an injured worker seeking safety, dignity and a return to her job was left carrying the consequences of widespread institutional non-compliance.

Why?

When employers and insurers are not compelled to meet their obligations, when regulators don’t enforce compliance, and when legal “processes” add further trauma instead of securing protection, the question remains:

What practical value do workplace laws and workers’ compensation regulations have if nobody makes the responsible organisations obey them?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 542-543.