Optimising the health of people in road injury compensation processes: what is the role of regulators and insurers?

Although compensation and rehabilitation schemes exist to assist health and recovery of people injured in road crashes, evidence shows they can also have a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of injured people. Some compensation system elements, including complicated and adversarial claims processes, poor communication between claims managers and injured people, and prioritisation of financial viability of the system rather than health of individuals, can result in lower levels of perceived fairness and poorer health among injured people. Ironically, these same policy and management actions designed to protect the viability of the system can also result in poorer overall system performance. To ensure injury compensation and rehabilitation systems perform their important role as facilitators of recovery for injured people, we suggest they should focus on i) a fundamental shift away from a ‘defensive’ approach prioritising short-term financial targets toward a proactive model of client recovery, ii) improving communication in claims management and medical assessment processes, and iii) introducing less adversarial aspects of overall scheme design. Together, it is suggested these elements can assist to improve health of injured people and the overall performance of injury rehabilitation and compensation systems.