Fewer injured workers are returning to work. Here's a cause we don't talk about.

Something is slipping in Australian injury management, and the national numbers make it hard to ignore.

Safe Work Australia's 2025 National Return to Work Survey put the national return-to-work rate at 88.9%. That is down from 91.6% in 2021, and it continues a decline that has been running since 2014. The current return-to-work rate, which counts workers who had returned and were still in a paid job when surveyed, sat at 78.8%, a figure that has been falling since 2016.

The gap between injury types is wider still. Workers with a physical injury returned at 90.2%. For workers with a psychological injury, the rate was 76.5%.

Most of the explanations offered for this are sound. Cases are more complex than they used to be. Psychological injuries are harder to resolve and slower to recover from. Legislative thresholds are shifting. All true, and all worth taking seriously.

There is also a quieter cause, and it rarely gets named. The people best placed to drive a good return to work are spending less and less of their time actually doing it.

The work that drives outcomes is the work that gets squeezed

Ask an experienced injury manager what moves a case forward, and very little of it is administrative. It is the early phone call. It is the conversation with the treating doctor, the time spent understanding a worker's real situation, and the effort of working with an employer to find suitable duties that genuinely fit. It is judgment, and it is relationships.

The Safe Work Australia data backs this up in a striking way. The survey found that injured workers were more likely to return to work when their employer had helped them manage the injury before a claim was even lodged. Before the paperwork. Before the formal process began. What helped most was early, human involvement.

Now look at how an injury manager's day actually runs. Certificates to read and interpret. Notes to write up. Information to move from one system to the next. Reports to compile. Reconciliations to check. Each task is necessary. Together, they eat the hours that early, considered work depends on.

When a caseload is buried in administration, the first thing to go is not compliance. Compliance gets done, because it has to. What suffers is the considered, relationship-driven work that never shows up as overdue, yet quietly determines whether someone gets back to work at all.

A recovery problem, not only a paperwork problem

It would be easy to read the return-to-work decline as a purely clinical story, or a scheme-design story. It is partly both. It is also a story about attention, and where it ends up going.

The workers who do return are returning less fully than they once did. Safe Work Australia found that while 64.7% went back to the same duties, only 53.4% resumed their previous hours, down from 58.1% in 2021. Recovery is getting harder to start, and harder to sustain.

None of this is a failing of the people doing the work. If anything, it is the opposite. Injury management attracts people who are good with people, then asks them to spend most of the day on tasks that have nothing to do with that strength.

If we want return-to-work outcomes to improve, we should stop asking injury management professionals to become better administrators and start giving them more time to be what they already are: skilled professionals who build relationships, make sound decisions and help people recover.

Those conversations will never be automated.

The administration surrounding them should be.

Source: Safe Work Australia, 2025 National Return to Work Survey.