“I Need Support, but No More Emails”: What I Told My Second Workers’ Compensation Solicitor - October 2022

By the time I approached a second workers’ compensation solicitor, I was struggling to read another email.

I had asked for a safe working environment. After I made a workers’ compensation claim due to employer retaliation, an injury management plan was issued. I wanted that plan implemented, my treating health professionals involved, and a safe path back to my job and university community. I kept trying to explain why the ongoing conditions around me mattered to my recovery.

In one email to the firm, I wrote:

“I can’t view any more emails...”

That sentence came after years of trying to get someone to listen. I told the firm that I had reported my concerns to SafeWork NSW around October 2020 and to SIRA in January 2021. Serious conduct by my employer and insurer had continued despite those reports. I needed the solicitor to examine what had happened, rather than assume the employer and insurer had complied with their obligations.

I wrote:

“I tried to communicate what happened.”

I had sent the firm a USB containing evidence. I had also sent a timeline of incidents. Yet my circumstances were being pushed through a standard claims process while the cause of my injury and the barriers to returning to work remained in place. Yet again. It felt like a repeat of my experience with the first workers compensation solicitor. It was re-traumatising and extremely frustrating.

In my other email, I described what the interruption to my income and the use of my leave had meant for me. I feared losing another $30,000 from my superannuation fund. I wrote that I had been forced to use my remaining annual and long service leave while still being harassed by the cause of the claim and while I sought the compensation payments I was owed.

I also raised the absence of a replacement case manager, after the initial one who had issued my injury management plan, left the insurer. I described repeatedly asking CCI to communicate with me about who would take over. My summary of the response I experienced was one word:

“Silence.”

I was trying to explain that my psychological symptoms could not be dealt with in isolation from what I said was still happening. I wrote:

“Symptoms of psychological injuries cannot be treated separately from the cause. And no one listened to the cause.”

The emails show how frightened and exhausted I was. They also show what I was asking for. I wanted the financial harm addressed. I wanted the isolation and conduct of organisational mobbing to stop. I wanted contact with my university community, which had been my workplace and support network for two decades. I wanted my treating doctor and psychologist involved in recovery and return to work planning.

That was the whole point of a workers compensation statutory scheme!

I wrote plainly about what correspondence had become for me:

“I’ve gone into ‘don’t hurt me mode’ with emails…”

In the second email, I made the request even clearer:

“I need support, but no more emails. They’re a trigger of trauma.”

Those words were a request for a different way to communicate with someone who was already overwhelmed. I needed the people assisting me to hear what I was saying and take practical steps.

I ended that email with the simplest statement I could make:

“I need positive progress for procedural fairness and natural justice. I need the abuse to end. I need kindness.”

I still want my injury management plan acted on. I still want a safe return to my job, with proper safeguards and the people responsible for my recovery working together. 

These emails record how hard I tried to make that need understood, even when writing them had become painful.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 551 & 554.