Welcome to the Research Action Alliance on the Consequences of Work Injury

Study of barriers to claims filing

Principal Investigator: Alice de Wolff

This is an update and expansion of earlier work on the prevalence of work injury non-reporting. It will investigate the reasons behind workers' decisions not to file a claim or to abandon a claim after filing, and the financial consequences of such a decision. An examination of non-reporting may expose critical gaps in the compensation system and the shifting of workplace injury costs to individuals and other social support systems.

The first part of the project is a series of six focus groups with workers who have sustained a work injury but have not filed a claim or have abandoned one. The second component is an update of a 1994 Ontario Medical Association study that found that 51% of Ontario physicians had received a request from a patient to not report a work injury over a one-month period and 36% had received three such requests over a six-month period.

Because the Ontario compensation system has changed since the study was conducted and market pressures for firms to cut costs have increased, it would be of considerable interest to compare current statistics to those found in the 1994 study. A short survey reproducing the questions from the 1994 study is planned that can be delivered on one side of a large post card.

The project will begin in early 2007 and be completed in 2008. The project is of particular interest to administrators of various social assistance programs because it will give a sense of the burden of work injury that falls through the cracks of the workers' compensation system, and that possibly get covered by other social programs.