Written by Sarah Walls
A Senate standing committee inquiring into sports injuries has drawn attention to the lack of no-fault injury compensation in Australia and the failure to implement the National Injury Insurance Scheme (NIIS) recommended by the Productivity Commission in 2011. Please support our petition for no-fault compensation for Australian injured patients.
The NIIS was intended to have four streams: road accidents, workplace accidents, medical treatment injuries and general and community injuries. In 2017 the Council of Australian Governments decided not to go ahead with the medical and general streams. Now there is pressure on the Federal Government to address these two glaring gaps in no-fault injury compensation In Australia.
In September the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs handed down its report on Concussion and Repeated Head Trauma in Contact Sports. The committee said that “the absence of a no-fault injury compensation scheme in Australia was raised as a key issue during the inquiry. The committee agrees with inquiry participants that the absence of such a scheme represents a gap in Australia’s system of care for people who, amongst other things, sustain concussions and head trauma while playing sport.”
Without a no-fault compensation scheme, the committee said, injured sports players could only seek redress through the legal system, a process that is “highly uncertain, costly and commonly results in inadequate outcomes”. The committee considered that “a no-fault accident injury insurance scheme may be the solution to providing adequate care and support for people who participate in sport and who suffer concussions, brain trauma, and any resulting long-term neurodegenerative conditions”.
The committee said that New Zealand’s no-fault accident compensation scheme was “a good example of how to effectively insure sports participants, and others, who sustain injuries”. It noted that a similar scheme, the National Injury Insurance Scheme, was advocated for during the inquiry.
The Young People in Nursing Homes National Alliance (YPNHNA) submitted that a National Injury Insurance Scheme should be the “focal point for funding the treatment and care of severe head trauma from sporting accidents”. It considered that a general injury stream could cover catastrophic sporting injuries and provide injury management to the same standard as the various state and territories’ no-fault motor vehicle injury schemes.
The YPNHNA policy director, Mr Alan Blackwood, told the inquiry: “We call for the immediate implementation of the general injury stream of the National Injury Insurance Scheme to enable people who suffer traumatic brain injury and other catastrophic injuries to obtain the medical and other supports they need. The fact that we still do not have this scheme promised by government in 2013 to provide cover for all injuries like this is a travesty.”
So organisations concerned with injured sports players are pushing for the implementation of the general stream of the NIIS and supporters of our petition are pushing for the implementation of the medical stream. Hopefully, this will increase the chances of government action.
We are very grateful to all those supporters who wrote to the ALP and their local member calling on the ALP to reinstate its commitment to the NIIS when adopting its 2023 national platform at its national conference last month. We have been waiting to see the text of the national platform before reporting back to you, but it is not yet available. However, the office of the Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten, told Sarah last week that while the commitment to the NIIS has not been reinstated in the platform, the government would decide its position on what action to take after the NDIS review is handed down in October.
What does remain in the ALP national platform is the commitment to patient-centred care. This commitment is also included in the terms of reference for the NSW special commission of enquiry into health funding. Sarah wrote to the NSW Minister for Health, Ryan Park, in April, asking that patient harm and compensation arrangements be included in the terms of reference. The first term of reference is as follows: “the funding of health services provided in NSW and how the funding can most effectively support the safe delivery of high quality, timely, equitable and accessible patient centred care and health services to the people of NSW, now and into the future.”
As we have shown in earlier updates, the values underlying patient-centred care – compassion, respect for individual patient choice and transparency – are in conflict with the adversarial stance adopted in litigation. They are much more consistent with a no-fault compensation scheme. So logically, Labor’s commitment to the provision of patient-centred care must also involve a commitment to no-fault compensation.
Please encourage everyone you know to sign and share our petition. The more signatures we have, the better the chance of getting politicians to act on no-fault compensation for injured patients and others injured in the community.
We are very grateful for your continuing support!
Sarah and Vickie