IRO Closed the Complaint. The Harm Continued - January 2023

The previous post showed what CCI told IRO about me, what my treating doctor recorded, and how IRO closed the complaint while the underlying failures remained unresolved. See “Always Unfit”? Prove It, Catholic Church Insurance - January 2023.

By December 2022, I was still asking three basic questions: who was managing my claim, did they understand the trauma, and would my Injury Management Plan finally be implemented? 

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CCI could contact my GP when they wanted my entire medical file. Where was that effort to help me recover?

After reading CCI’s responses through IRO, I called my GP in distress.

During that conversation, he told me that CCI had contacted the practice requesting my entire medical file.

The practice refused to hand it over. I hadn’t authorised the release of my whole medical history.

This was a doctor who had known me since I was seven years old. He knew the person behind the claim. My current GP also knows me as a professional woman trying to recover from circumstances that kept causing further harm. Their support mattered enormously when I felt nobody else was listening.

CCI could reach my GP when it wanted my whole history. Why were my doctor and I still struggling to obtain the cooperation needed for my recovery? 

And what a confronting contradiction to their answer about failed attempts to contact my GP - while successfully contacting my GP at the same time! 

A request for a file is not a conversation about suitable duties, rehabilitation or protection from further harm. IRO’s correspondence referred to attempts to obtain clinical notes. What my GP told me adds a crucial question about the scope of that request: why my entire file?

I had reported a psychosocially unsafe work environment. The matter reached HR. That wasn’t my choice, but an associate director’s action in my unit, without consulting with me first. Instead of the hazards being controlled, I experienced HR becoming another, much greater source of harm.

I wanted to recover in the job I’ve done for almost twenty years. I needed a safe environment, some rehabilitation, suitable duties and the support of colleagues I’ve also supported and known for years.

There was already an Injury Management Plan. There were treating recommendations. There were repeated requests for no contact with the person causing me harm, including psychological guarding on a medical certificate. The 9 June 2020 factual investigation report recorded the no-contact issue.

That was the situation requiring action.

I had already documented that I began recovering when the harassment stopped. The continued contact, and the harm it caused, needed to be examined. A case manager should have been coordinating with my nominated treating professionals and the employer’s return-to-work coordinator to make recovery possible.

Instead, I was still pleading for protection.

My privacy had already been violated by HR through private messages to a campus minister, with one message taken out of context. Imagine what it felt like to learn that the insurer had then sought my whole medical history while telling IRO that I had “always been unfit”.

I feared more private information would be pulled out of context to keep that narrative going. The request  was another threat to my privacy when I needed safety and care.

My GP protected that boundary. My entire file wasn’t released.

But his refusal doesn’t remove the need to investigate what was requested, why, and on whose authority. The request itself, the practice’s notes and CCI’s contact records need to be examined. What permission did CCI claim to have? Who authorised seeking the whole file? How did that request relate to the answers supplied to IRO?

And who wrote those answers? Who contributed to them, checked them and approved them? Did anyone at ACU have input? I don’t know. Those questions require the internal correspondence and drafts.

I’m asking for investigators to examine how ACU and CCI communicated with each other while my nominated treating professionals and I were left chasing the cooperation needed for recovery.

The WHS questions belong in that investigation too: what happened to the employer’s duty to protect my health, the responsibility of staff not to harm others through their work, and the protections against detrimental treatment for raising safety concerns?

My third employment lawyer advised me to make a claim because it wasn’t worth my health.

I entered the scheme seeking protection. I didn’t expect to be left defending my privacy while my recovery arrangements remained undone.

This is why the whole sequence matters: my original psychosocial safety complaint, the escalation through HR, the continuing contact, the missing case management, the treating recommendations, the request for my entire file and the answers passed through IRO.

Investigate that sequence. Obtain the records. Find out who made the decisions and why.

My family and I shouldn’t have been left carrying the distress while I spent years doing the investigative work myself, unpaid.

I wanted to recover in my job. Why was obtaining my whole medical history pursued when the practical work of helping me recover was still not happening?

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28 December 2022: three questions that should have been straightforward

More than a year later, I was still seeking basic clarity.

On 28 December 2022, I asked CCI to confirm in writing:

“Is Sandy a case manager the way Jessica was?”

I asked whether Sandy had been briefed about what had happened and understood why contact with CCI had become a trigger of compounded trauma.

And I asked:

“Is CCI finally going to cooperate to implement the injury management plan agreement attached?”

Three questions. Who would manage the process? Did that person understand the history? Would the agreed injury management finally proceed?

My documents include captured professional-profile material describing Sandy’s experience in case management and identifying skills including return-to-work strategies, injury management plans, recovery plans and contact with medical professionals. It also records a CCI team-manager role beginning in September 2021.

That profile didn’t establish Sandy’s assignment or responsibilities in my claim. It made my request for clarification entirely reasonable. The skills were publicly described. I wanted to know whether they would be applied to the recovery we had been waiting for.

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11 January 2023: an automatic acknowledgment

On 11 January 2023, I followed up:

“Just a kind reminder to confirm in writing responses to my questions below.”

CCI’s workers’ compensation mailbox sent an automatic reply:

“Thank you for your email. CCI has received your correspondence.”

Receipt was acknowledged. My three questions weren’t answered in that message.

This is the distinction that keeps disappearing in complaint handling. An acknowledgment is a record that correspondence arrived. A substantive answer tells the worker who’s responsible and what will happen.

The documents this post is based on don’t contain CCI’s substantive written answers to those three questions.

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SIRA: make the communication plan mean something

In my email to SIRA, I asked it to ensure CCI answered. I also asked what IRO meant by a proposed communication plan.

I explained why sudden calls were difficult after the treatment I had experienced. I wrote:

“The communication plan must start in writing by Catholic Church Insurance”

I needed clarity about acceptance of the claim and implementation of the Injury Management Plan so I could focus on healing and recovery in my job.

I added:

“My GP and allied health professionals are also still waiting for the same thing.”

This was a request for practical action involving the people supporting my recovery.

A communication plan has to produce communication that the worker can understand and rely on. It has to identify responsibility and the next steps. Silence, repeated acknowledgments and unexplained calls cannot do that work.

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January 2023: I asked IRO and SIRA again

I again asked IRO and SIRA to obtain written answers. I offered reports from my GP about my fitness to do my job and described the mounting financial pressure: inflation, living costs and mortgage repayments.

I was a woman trying to hold on to my independence while institutions continued controlling access to the support I was seeking.

I set a deadline of close of business on Thursday, 19 January 2023. I also demanded a written explanation of the communication plan.

My words were blunt:

“Ongoing lack of communication and cooperation with silence, complacency and avoidance from all of you is not an example of communication.”

On 18 January 2023, IRO acknowledged the complaint, said it had raised it with the insurer and promised an update within three business days.

That was a response, and it should be recorded accurately. It was a promise to pursue the matter. It wasn’t CCI’s answer about case management, briefing or implementation.

I replied that I wanted another IRO officer to handle it, explaining the trauma I associated with the earlier handling. Once again, I asked for the simple questions to be answered in writing.

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The envelope, the back payment, and the harm left unresolved

I remember the distress surrounding the envelope from CCI. I couldn’t even bring myself to open it. It turned out that it contained the remittance and payment-summary material associated with some “back payment”. 

That’s what I understood had happened in the PIC mediation with the first workers compensation solicitor. I wasn’t an informed participant with what was being negotiated around me. It’s my life’s work and my voice had been displaced. I should never have ended up in a PIC mediation at all. That’s how CCI and their lawyers manipulated the system, undermined a statutory scheme, financially crushed me to coerce me down a path that I didn’t understand nor chose, because information I had a legal right to know was also withheld from me by CCI. 

What CCI did was no accident. 

I acknowledge that I received some back payment. My concern is what remained unresolved around it.

Receiving some overdue money didn’t implement my Injury Management Plan, facilitate suitable duties or resolve treatment funding and outstanding entitlements. It didn’t restore depleted resources or undo the harm to me and my family.

I experienced the combination of a damaging incapacity narrative, prolonged inaction and financial pressure as a dismantling of my life.

CCI withheld the cooperation that would allow me to recover in my job and contribute to the university community again.

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The unanswered questions concerned more than payments and paperwork. While I fought for cooperation with my recovery, I remained separated from the university community I had served since 2001. That isolation became another part of the harm. 

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 620-623.

I am frightened and writing my story publicly for my safety, after exhausting the avenues reasonably available to obtain protection. I want the harm to stop so I can recover safely in my job.