We were recently presenting to a group of CPA accountants and we shared an update on NSW workers compensation specifically focusing on the impact of covid as well as mental health trends.  There were a lot of great insights and thought our broader audience would benefit from the information.

Firstly SIRA the State Insurance Regulatory Authority released some interesting statistics regarding the number of Covid related NSW Workers compensation claims which you can see on your screen now.

As you can see there has been a massive increase in the number of work related covid claims from 15 June 2021 with the most recent numbers showing a total of 23,679 claims.  There are a couple of interesting insights to be taken out of these numbers.

Firstly, at the beginning of the pandemic the NSW Workers compensation legislation was updated to include a presumption of contracting Covid 19 at work unless it could be demonstrated otherwise for high risk industries such as health, retail and hospitality.  This legislation is still in force although we note that its removal is currently being debated in parliament.  The reality is that the combination of tis legislation and the removal of the contract tracing at the height of the pandemic lead to a scenario where it was very difficult to demonstrate where the virus was contracted and therefore may have been to a contributing factor to these higher numbers.

The second interesting point is that just under 2% of the claims recorded were as a result of adverse reactions to the vaccine.  From these numbers, there are two possible insights.  Firstly there was some challenges experienced in the Federal Government scheme providing compensation for adverse reactions.  This scheme has requirements of a certain amount of time spent in hospital and a few other eligibility criteria.  It is possible that some of the claims reported here represent those that fell through the cracks of the federal scheme.  The second insight is that these claims might also be representative of employees of businesses who went above and beyond the government mandates to implement mandatory vaccination policies for their business.  Albeit this simplistic data does not comprehensively show this, in our view it is not too farfetched.

The final insight is that again, just under 2% of the claims shown in this dataset also included a psychological component.  This in particular drew our attention as the most recent data that we could find indicated that the average mental health related workers compensation claim across Australia was 26.6 weeks.  To put this in perspective, this means the average mental health related workers compensation claims is more than 6 months which is more than spinal cord / nerve damage related claims.  Certainly something for employers to stand up and take notice of and formulate strategies around such as implementing an Employee Assistance Program for which we recommend and provide access for all of our members her at On Demand HR.