I Had Had Enough: My Complaint to SIRA About Medical Assessments, Safety and a System I Could No Longer Trust
By the time I sent this complaint on 21 October 2022 to the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority, I had had enough.
I wanted a safe work environment. After my employer continued to injure me in retaliation, I wanted the injury management plan issued by Catholic Church Insurance on 25 June 2020 to be implemented. I wanted to recover in my job, with communication between my treating practitioners, the insurer and my employer, and safeguards against the conduct I had reported.
Instead, I was trying to protect myself from contact I experienced as harassment “on behalf of the university”, struggling to maintain a connection with my workplace while this individual was isolating me “on behalf of the university”, and being directed toward further medical assessments under vague and fabricated threats, “on behalf of the university.”
I requested a safe work environment, and instead, I found myself repeatedly having to answer questions about my “fitness for work” that I’ve been successfully performing for two decades, while unethical practitioners were deemed to have a right to an “opinion” but my voice and statutory right to return and recover in my HEW 8 professional job in my university community, was disrespectfully ignored and disregarded by both regulators and lawyers.
All this shit was happening around me, while my questions about workplace safety went unanswered. That’s why the conduct of independent medical examinations became part of my complaint to SIRA. It was also why I questioned the way SIRA and SafeWork NSW responded when I sought accountability.
That’s the context missing when my story is reduced to whether I attended an IME. I did attend assessments. Too many “assessments” under threat and beyond reasonable and fair, whether from employer or insurer, depending what fabricated excuse suited the fragmented system that has allowed them to do this. But the SafeWork NSW inspector believed it all, because of the perpetrator’s job title, while literally telling me, “I’m not here to play he said she said.”
I also asked why aaaaalllllll these repeated IMEs were necessary, what information practitioners had been given, how my privacy would be protected (because it hadn’t been so far), whether I could have someone with me as one safeguard, and what anyone was actually doing about the conditions I told them had injured me.*
*See SafeWork NSW’s response quoted above. In other words they were doing NOTHING but then went further by perpetuating the lie they were told! No independent verification or if the agreements, plans, policies, laws and regulations were operationally implemented!
To me, all this is victim blaming at a whole new systemic level, ironically, by regulatory agencies we trusted to intervene and keep us safe at work!
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/08/enter-unsafework-nsw-that-rtw-plan-i.html
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/when-regulators-close-ranks-systemic.html
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A report after an examination that never took place
On 14 November 2019, I went to an appointment with Deepinder Miller, arranged by my publicly funded university employer, under a vague by very frightening and distressing threat, from the moment I requested a psychosocially safe work environment. I asked questions because I didn’t understand why I had been sent there, straight after raising concerns about my safety at work. Why had I been sent for an “assessment” after raising concerns about bullying, harassment and my safety at work?
Deepinder Miller ended the appointment and told me to ask HR.
I won’t repeat Deepinder Miller’s lies on record. It’s retraumatising. I’ve already written emotionally charged posts on those incidents of WHS breaches leading to distress and fear in my story -
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-doctor-who-commits-fraud-2019.html; and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/02/hr-associate-director-unfit-to-do.html
I had attended. I was trying to understand the purpose of the assessment. An examination didn’t proceed, yet a substantial “report” was produced about me. I found that horrifying.
It wasn’t merely an upsetting appointment that I could put behind me. I received the report much later, in October 2020, alongside arrangements for yet another “assessment” by my publicly funded university employer under a continuation of their bullshit and vague threats, only three months after one I attended for the insurer, Catholic Church Insurance. ONLY THREE MONTHS APART with relentless harassment in between by the cause of my claim, the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY, and suspiciously no cooperation from CCI from around August 2020, including no identified case manager responsible to implement the injury management plan agreement?!
And then RG, the “senior claims specialist”, suddenly recorded herself as case manager after ignoring me, waiting for the damage to be done and fooling workers compensation solicitor #1. The records don’t lie when forensically analysed, nor the reactive cover up attempts, like RG suddenly having left CCI when my GP was given the run around when trying to get a hold of this alleged case manager. And nobody knew she had supposedly left and suddenly now worked for Transport for NSW?
See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/sira-nsw-and-illusion-of-regulation.html
Have readers caught on to what’s going here, because the regulators still haven’t.
Going back to Deepinder Miller. I questioned how such a detailed account could result from a meeting that had ended without an examination, and I disputed statements about what happened. Seeing that account used in further correspondence deepened my fear of what could be written about me without my experience being fairly heard.
I couldn’t bring myself to read it then. I still haven’t fully read it for my safety now. The delay, the disputed description of our brief meeting and the arrival of the report alongside another appointment, almost a year later, after non-stop WHS and regulatory violations by both employer and insurer, added to my distress. I complained about that experience and sought scrutiny of how an account of an examination that didn’t proceed had been produced and used.
The bundle I sent to SIRA NSW in October 2022 included public reviews concerning Deepinder Miller. I cannot verify what happened to the people who wrote them, and I don’t present their allegations as findings. They alarmed me because I recognised concerns about being listened to and about what appeared in reports. I wanted the bodies responsible for oversight to examine complaints properly, including my own.
A practitioner conducting an assessment of someone reporting psychological injury should understand that the manner of questioning and the handling of sensitive information can themselves cause distress.
I didn’t surrender my dignity or my interest in privacy by attending an appointment.
I’m sure the Hippocratic Oath that doctors swear by includes to “do no harm.”
I’m sure Hippocrates didn’t make an exception to allow a continuation of adverse action and systemic harm directed at workers who had a requested a workplace right to a safe work environment.
What a messed up system our contemporary society has! Where are the SAFEGUARDS?!
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A “Significant Cost” to the University. What About the Cost to Me?
In January 2020, the university arranged another assessment after their true motive with Deepinder Miller failed. This time it was with Michael Robertson. I engaged a second employment lawyer to challenge what was happening. I didn’t attend that proposed appointment.
On 15 January 2020, the university HR associate director asked my now second employment lawyer whether I intended to attend on 21 January. The email said:
“You will appreciate that if the University does not cancel the appointment in advance, a significant cost will still need to be paid”.
To quote from my post regarding that incident:
“How significant has the cost been for the university, by HR executive staff, to destroy my life, defrauding me of all my leave entitlements (personal, annual and long service leave), income, superannuation, livelihood, workers compensation fraud and likely more in suspected coercion, influence, aiding, abetting etc. of others, to collude in such destruction?
The financial abuse and exploitation alone should be taken extremely seriously, as well as contraventions of WHS laws.”
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/02/employment-lawyer-2-part-1-2020.html
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More appointments, while I was asking for protection and a return to my work
In mid-2020, I attended an insurer-arranged assessment with Melissa Barrett. I raised concerns about that experience, including the refusal of a support person. A safeguard!
See: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-doctor-full-of-innuendo-lies-and.html
Around the same period, I was trying to coordinate with my treating practitioners, the insurer and the university about returning to my work. My treating professionals had recommended rehabilitation support to help the people involved communicate. Then, on 25 June 2020, the insurer issued an injury management plan. Those were practical steps toward a supported return. I wanted them followed through.
Instead, the stressor that I’d been trying to protect myself from continued to contact me. The university’s national manager of employment relations and safety now used a new excuse to continue badgering and harassing me, when I had explicitly emailed her to LEAVE ME ALONE!
I tried reporting the harassment to police; I sought other means of protection, including an attempted application for an apprehended personal violence order; I tried blocking her emails to remove the stressor as per WHS policy; I begged the NTEU to intervene; and I finally asked for help from SafeWork NSW.
My doctor recorded “psychological guarding” concerning this person on my certificate of capacity. ACU and CCI didn’t even honour that recorded legal obligation for my safety either! All failed me and I was left unsafe, unprotected and in the hands of the primary cause of my claim, Rena Christmann!
I told the SafeWork NSW inspector that I was being isolated from colleagues who had been part of my working life for almost twenty years, while contact from the person I had asked to be protected from continued. That isolation was a safety concern in its own right.
SafeWork NSW recognises that limited access to other people and difficulty obtaining communication or emotional support can create psychosocial risks. I needed the SafeWork NSW inspector to consider the combined effect of the isolation, the continuing contact and the pressure to attend another “assessment” only THREE MONTHS after Melissa Barrett and without both employer and insurer cooperating with their return to work statutory obligations! Those risks were not addressed or investigated by SafeWork NSW. Instead the inspector told me they were not there “to play he said she said”, but did. SafeWork NSW took the word of the very perpetrator, who spoke “on behalf of the university.”
What SafeWork NSW did (and didn’t do that they should have done), along with how they treated me, is unforgivable and indefensible.
Those colleagues are part of my workplace community that I’ve known for almost twenty years. I wanted them to be able to speak with me. Feeling cut off from them intensified my isolation. IT STILL DOES AND THE TORTURE IS NOW SO MUCH WORSE.
SAFEWORK NSW REFUSED TO LISTEN REPEATEDLY, AND STOP THIS COERCED ISOLATION AND RECOGNISED PSYCHOSOCIAL HAZARD THAT WAS COMING FROM A PUBLICLY FUNDED UNIVERSITY EMPLOYER!
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I needed the injury management plan put into action
In October 2020, another appointment was arranged by the stressor who caused the claim and whom both employer and insurer allowed to continue harassing me under a statutory scheme. This time with Peter Young ONLY THREE MONTHS after Melissa Barrett. On 12 October, I told the university’s WHS manager about the psychological guarding on my certificate and I forwarded the appointment correspondence and wrote:
“What are you doing to ensure my safety…?”
That was a direct appeal for help. It needs to be read with everything happening around it: the earlier assessment for the insurer, the injury management plan I wanted implemented, the ongoing contact that distressed me, and my efforts to obtain protection. I couldn’t understand why another assessment was being pressed while my request to be protected from the reported workplace stressor remained unresolved.
CCI were fully aware. It was documented in incident #24 in their own commissioned FACTUAL INVESTIGATION REPORT!
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/05/catholic-church-insurance-june-2020.html
I also told my employer’s WHS and Wellbeing manager that I was distressed and demanded for Rena Christmann to stop contacting me. I told him to make the bullying and harassment to stop. That email shows what I was asking for at the time. I wasn’t asking to be left without support or without a path back to work. I was asking someone with responsibility for safety to address the conditions that were harming me!
Christmann was contacting the office of my treating psychologist without my permission (no signed consent) and even WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL GUARDING RECORDED on an updated medical certificate! This was a safe space I had a right to preserve without brazen harassment from Rena Christmann to distress me! How dare she!
My nominating treating professionals’ correspondence that month also said they’d recommended an independent rehabilitation provider to liaise between the parties. It was explained to Christmann in an email that therapy sessions were precious time and that my treating professional’s role was as my psychologist, not a messenger.
I needed practical coordination of my return, yet I felt trapped in a cycle of multiple and unethical appointment letters and distressing contact! No safety provided WHATSOEVER, ACU General Counsel!
I hadn’t signed a consent form authorising that national manager to contact my psychologist. I wanted to know what information was being sought or shared, on what basis, and why the recommended rehabilitation support had not become the focus.
I also raised concerns about the handling of private messages and the effect on my family. My family made a complaint. These matters added to my sense that even attempts to seek support or maintain private relationships could draw other people into what was happening to me. They deserve careful investigation, not dismissal as an emotional reaction to an appointment letter.
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Where was the boundary between the processes?
When I sought help from SafeWork NSW, I was trying to get a workplace safety concern addressed. I understood that the national manager of employment relations and safety was also communicating with the SafeWork NSW inspector, “on behalf of the university”. Yet my concerns about the continuing contact and isolation were being pushed between workplace safety, workers’ compensation and employment processes.
That gap is a serious systemic problem. If one body treats the assessment as an employment matter, another treats my safety complaint as separate from the compensation claim, and another focuses only on the medical report, who looks at their combined effect on the injured worker? It’s a faulty “process” that’s open to abuse by the employer as a continuation of adverse action!
At that critical moment, I didn’t need someone to invent another process for me. I needed someone to ask why I was being directed to another assessment so soon after the insurer’s assessment, while my treating practitioners’ concerns and my request for a safe return were still unresolved. I needed someone to examine whether the assessments were necessary, how they were arranged, and whether safeguards were actually provided!
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Even the written safeguard did not hold
Moving on to yet more traumatic systemic abuse. On 29 September 2021, I attended a video assessment arranged through the Personal Injury Commission with Professor Nicholas Glozier. The Commission’s written instructions said I could have one support person in the room if I announced that person at the start. I relied on that instruction. On the day, Glozier made my friend leave and engaged in conduct that was intrusive and violated my privacy, while responding to my question as to why he insisted that my support person leave, that “sometimes workers compensation solicitors get it wrong.”
THESE INSTRUCTIONS AND RIGHTS CAME DIRECTLY FROM THE PERSONAL INJURY COMMISSION!
I WANT HONEST ANSWERS! I THINK THE PUBLIC DESERVE HONEST ANSWERS!
See:
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-examination-i-was-not-prepared-for.html
I wrote to the Commission in October asking why the support described in its own instructions had been denied to me. That assessment took place inside my home. My concern is the loss of the safeguard I had been told I could use.
I wanted to know how the decision to exclude my support person was reached, particularly when the Commission’s own written instructions had told me I could have one!
See:
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/personal-injury-commission-pic-what.html
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What I wanted SIRA to answer
In June 2021, SIRA’s Enforcement and Prosecutions team acknowledged receiving my emails, attachments and material sent by registered post. A manager said she would review the information, identify matters within SIRA’s jurisdiction and respond with an outcome. I felt relief when I received that message. I thought the records I had worked so hard to assemble would finally be examined.
This is what happened instead:
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/sira-nsw-closed-my-complaint-phone.html;
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/is-it-safe-to-open-what-that-question.html
I had asked about the insurer’s actions, the absence of a replacement case manager, the injury management plan, my leave and income, and my ability to return safely to my work.
That’s why my complaint to SIRA NSW this time, in October 2022, was angry. My language was raw. I said I had had enough.
I questioned how a worker could be directed from one process to another while the original need for a safe return to work remained unresolved. I was frightened by what was happening to my health and livelihood and my human dignity, and angry that I still had to keep proving I was asking for help.
I had lost trust in SIRA and SafeWork NSW through my experience of trying to obtain answers from them.
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Whose costs counted?
I also keep returning to the university’s concern about a “significant cost”. What did ACU spend on proposed assessments and the “processes” that followed? What did CCI spend? I don’t have their complete figures, and I won’t invent them.
I can describe the cost to me. I used personal, annual and long service leave while trying to obtain help and return safely to work. By my calculations, that amounted to 305 days of leave, worth nearly $200,000. I was left without the ongoing income and workers’ compensation payments I was entitled to receive. I also experienced losses involving my superannuation and property. The amounts and responsibility for those losses need to be examined against the records.
See:
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/theft-of-two-decades-of-accrued-leave.html; and
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/greater-wage-theft-and-fraud-from-pcbu.html; and
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-home-i-was-trying-to-secure-and.html and any post on the parallel crisis and snowball effect.
The university counted the potential cancellation fee for one appointment.
See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/02/employment-lawyer-2-part-1-2020.html.
Who was counting the cost of leaving me without the supported return to work and statutory benefits withheld that I had been asking for?
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Why I am naming the practitioners
I’ve named the practitioners because their assessments or proposed assessments are part of the documented sequence I’m describing. I believe people should be able to discuss what happened to them in a medical assessment, identify the assessment they mean, and ask how complaints about it are handled.
Naming a practitioner doesn’t mean I can determine their motives, establish the truth of every public review, or make a finding of professional misconduct. Those questions require a proper examination of records and an opportunity for the people involved to respond. What I can say is what I experienced, what I disputed, what the written instructions said, and what I asked the responsible bodies to investigate.
What I cannot accept is a version of this history in which I’m said simply to have resisted “assessment”. I attended appointments, raised concerns, sought protection and kept asking to return to my work safely. The distress those assessments caused, and the safety concerns I raised while they were being arranged, belong in the same account.
My trust in the system was worn away over years of trying to get clear answers from my employer, insurer, SIRA, SafeWork NSW, and other “processes”. Each time I was redirected or left without an answer, it became harder to believe anyone would take responsibility for the whole picture.
I am still asking for that whole picture to be examined. I want the concerns I raised about the assessments and support safeguards addressed. I want a clear account of what happened to the injury management plan issued on 25 June 2020. Above all, I want the safe, supported return to my work that I had been asking for from the beginning.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 549-550.
