How WHS Leaders Can Best Support Injured Employees and Their Return To Work

Do everything possible to demonstrate genuine care, support and flexibility from the organisation. If you're doing that, you're doing a great job.

— Matthew Green

About this session

Getting injured can be scary. Getting injured at work can be even more distressing, with employees worried not just about their health but also job security and future employment.

In this session, leading health practitioner, author and founder of BodyGuide, Matthew Green, arms safety professionals with the tools they need to fully support the physical and secondary effects of workplace injuries. He shares exactly what safety professionals need to confidently deliver best practice support, helping employees while also reducing workers compensation costs.

Matthew walks through some relevant (and simple) neuroscience behind how we react to pain and injury, including why distress, not tissue damage, is what actually predicts a slow return to work.

Especially relevant for Heads of Wellbeing & Safety, HR Managers, and Health and Safety professionals looking to strengthen their return to work approach.

A framework for integrated injury management

Injury management is often treated as three separate jobs: preventing injuries, catching problems early, and handling the formal return to work process once a claim exists.

Treated in isolation, each stage ends up reactive, and the organisation only ever steps in once things have already gone wrong. Matthew offers a practical way to think about all three as one connected system instead, where what happens upstream directly shapes how smoothly, or slowly, someone gets back to work.

• Prevention is about culture and job design: catching things before they become a complaint at all.
• Early intervention is the pathway that opens once someone does raise an issue, short, informal support that keeps them at work instead of on leave.
• Return to work is the formal, legislated end of that chain, and it's also the stage where employers have the least flexibility.

Most organisations only invest in that last stage, the one with the least room to move. The real leverage sits earlier, in prevention and early intervention, where there's still space to shape the outcome.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Retire the idea of the malingerer. Most people who seem difficult during a claim are scared and defensive, not faking. Treating them as suspects damages the trust needed to bring them back sooner.

2. Change the question, not just the tone. Asking "how's your pain" keeps someone anchored to their injury. Asking about their case manager, their physio goals, or what they can still do at work builds trust and keeps them engaged.

3. Distress predicts recovery more than the injury itself. A severe injury with low distress often heals faster than a mild injury with high distress, and distress doesn't show up on a scan, which is exactly why it gets missed.

4. Genuine care, flexibility and clear expectations move the numbers. Pre-claim assistance is linked to an 18% higher return to work rate for physical claims and 33% higher for psychological claims.