Thank you to all of those who have engaged and supported the Workers’ Voice study to date. It’s not too late to get involved!
There are lots of ways for workers who have made a compensation claim and their family or friends who supported them, to get involved.
We understand that some people are familiar with research, but for others, it may feel a bit strange or daunting. You can choose if and how you would like to get involved by visiting our website.
The survey is open until 11:59pm (AEST) Friday 31st May, 2024 and the data will then be analysed in detail.
COMPLETE THE SURVEY HERE.
Workers’ Voice Study Updates:
Over 500 individuals (including those who have made a workers’ compensation claim and their supporters) have actively participated in the Workers’ Voice study, contributing valuable insights through surveys, sharing personal stories, and submitting comments or questions. Your engagement is shaping the conversation and will be used to drive meaningful change in the future. Thank you for being a part of this important initiative.
Most Positive Impact:
During their workers’ compensation claim experience, individuals identified three key figures who had the most positive impact on their journey: family members, dedicated doctors or surgeons providing crucial medical care, and other health professionals offering invaluable assistance. These individuals played pivotal roles in providing comfort, guidance, and care throughout the process.
Most Negative Impact:
Amid workers’ compensation claim processes, certain individuals have had a notably negative impact on the experience. According to participants, the top three sources of having a negative impact were the insurer, employer, and work colleagues.
Who is Providing Input into the Study So Far?
We have a range of people sharing their experiences as part of the Workers’ Voice study which include a spread across:
- different age groups 18 – 75 years,
- years of claim with 2/3 in the last 10 years,
- length of claim from less than 12 months to 2 years or more.
We will explore the specifics and share more of this information once the survey has closed.
We’re Seeking Supporters!
We’re reaching out to those who have offered support to individuals navigating a workers’ compensation claim, whether as friends or family members. Your insights are invaluable in shaping the Workers’ Voice study as well. Please take just 10 minutes to share your perspective and experiences with us.
Complete the survey here and help us better understand the support system surrounding workers’ compensation claims.
Thank you for your contribution!
Spreading the Word!
The Workers’ Voice study team have been busy getting out and about and spreading the word on what the Workers’ Voice study is, what we are seeking to achieve and how you can get involved, including:
- Online Information Session: Our lead researcher Professor Alex Collie ran an online information session exclusively for those who have lodged a workers’ compensation claim and their supporters. Participants had the chance to ask questions about the study and how they can get involved. Stay up to date with our upcoming events reading our regular project updates.
- SIRA Presentation: Professor Collie also spoke to 120 attendees at a State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) meeting. The Workers’ Voice study update was well received by all.
- RTW Matters interview: We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak to ‘Return to Work Matters’ and have the 2-part interview included in their subscriber newsletter. Part one of the interview covered the background to the study and what it hopes to achieve. In the second part, Professor Collie got into the nuts and bolts of the study. Some questions and answers included:
How is the project funded?
“It took me a couple of years to secure the funding for it because I wanted to get it funded
independently. We didn’t go to a regulator or insurer or anyone else. So it’s funded by the Australian Research Council through a competitive grant that we won because of the quality of our ideas. None of those ‘powers that be’ have any role in the governance, management or operation of the project. It’s perfectly set up to be independent. The group that does have an important role in the way the project is run are injured workers and their families.We’re happy for anyone to promote the study and talk about it. But the decision-making about what happens in the study is partitioned off to the researchers and our lived experience advisors.”
How are you making sure you’re getting a broad range of perspectives and experiences from diverse groups in the workforce?
“That’s something we’ve thought about a lot. The most valuable information we’ll rely on the
most for developing these models is what we’ll get through interviews, focus groups and
qualitative methods.
To make sure we’ve got a representative cross-section of workers and their family members in that, we’ve decided to start by recruiting and enrolling as many people as we possibly can in an initial survey, and we can select some of them based on their characteristics to participate in the more detailed part of the project. So once we’ve got hundreds of people enrolled in a survey, we’re planning to narrow it down to about 50 people across different states, genders, ages, types of injuries and different experiences, positive and negative. So let’s call that the stratified sample, which will then move into the more detailed data collection component.
What we’re doing at the moment is going out as broadly as we can and telling as many people as we can about the project, to get them to engage in an initial exercise — a survey, or send us your story or sign up for our newsletter — and so far, hundreds of people have completed the survey. And we’re hoping to get hundreds more over the next couple of months. That will give us a big pool of people We’ve had some general media, a social media campaign is going on, we’re talking directly to injured worker groups around the country, we’ve asked all the regulators and insurers and they’ve been good at getting it out through their networks.
We’ve been contacting other organisations and charities to send the message, so it’s been a multi-pronged promotion and recruitment strategy. But we want our contact to be directly with workers.
What we’re doing at the moment is going out as broadly as we can and telling as many people as we can about the project, to get them to engage in an initial exercise — a
survey, or send us your story or sign up for our newsletter — and so far, hundreds of people
have completed the survey. And we’re hoping to get hundreds more over the next couple of months. That will give us a big pool of people We’ve had some general media, a social media campaign is going on, we’re talking directly to injured worker groups around the country, we’ve asked all the regulators and insurers and they’ve been good at getting it out through their networks.
In the first survey, we ask people about their cultural background, the language they speak, gender, age and other socio-demographic stuff as well as their type of injury and overall experience.
We don’t just want people who’ve had negative experiences. We want people with positive experiences too. We’re also using an interesting device to help people imagine or describe their experiences in a simple way — called story arcs. We’ve designed some visual stories about people’s experiences with their worker’s comp claims. For example, ‘Things started well, but then dropped off or became really negative’. Or ‘It started out badly and then got better’, or ‘It bounced all over the place and I never knew what was going on’.
We ask people to look at these pictures and say which one describes their overall experience in the workers’ comp system. We tested this with our lived experience advisors and they liked
this idea to get information. This will help us identify people with a range of experiences that
we’ll follow up with in the later data collection project.”
Are you using any quantitative data, like the Return to Work survey?
“Yes. At the moment we’re designing these models for our current workers’ comp systems so
we’re using a lot of existing evidence to get baseline information that we can build on —
everything we know from analysing workers’ comp claims data for decades and the Return to
work survey and published qualitative and other evidence is all in the mix of things that
underpin the design of the ‘current state models’. And then what we’ll do with the ‘lived experience models’ is those assumptions and those features will change based on the information we get from workers. So we’ll take out the current stuff and put in what we get from the surveys, interviews and focus groups.
What we don’t know at the moment is the extent to which we’ll have to change those
assumptions based on what the workers tell us. So it might be they want a system that looks
nothing like the way that current systems are designed, so it needs to start from scratch Or it
may be they say ‘Most of it is alright, we just change who’s eligible or the sorts of benefits we
can get’.”
How many people do you need for the survey, interviews and workshop?
“We aim to recruit about 500 for the survey, enrol 25 injured workers and 25 family members
and carers in the one-on-one interviews and from there, we’ll invite some of those people to be involved in a series of workshops.
We’re planning three workshops with 5 or 6 people. The workshops are where we really get into the development of these models. We’ll present them with an initial model, get their
response to that, play around with it, change it, get more feedback, revise it and have another workshop. We’ll do that process until we get to the point where we think we’ve got it right.
That’ll probably take us 6 to 12 months to get through that.”
Survey closes 11:59pm (AEST) Friday 31st May 2024
Complete the survey here and have your say on how we can re-imagine workers’ compensation in Australia.
About the Workers’ Voice Study
Workers’ Voice is a groundbreaking 3-year research study run by Monash University aimed at transforming Australia’s workers’ compensation system. Recognising the need for improvement, especially in supporting workers after injury, the study seeks to understand and address the complexities and stressors of the claim process. By gathering insights from those who have made claims in the past decade, as well as their family and friends, Workers’ Voice aims to develop innovative, people-centered solutions.
Surveys are still open for participation, ensuring your voice is heard in shaping the future of workers’ compensation. Join us in re-imagining a system that truly supports workers’ recovery and return to work.