Mental Injury Provisional Payments

What are Provisional Payments?

From 1 July 2021, Victorian workers and volunteers will have access to early treatment and support while awaiting an outcome for their mental injury claim. Payment for this support is called provisional payments. This law was introduced to help remove financial barriers that would prevent a worker from seeking support, facilitate earlier mental health care and reduce the length of time to recover from a mental injury.

Workers who are eligible for provisional payments will be entitled to claim reasonable costs of:

medical treatment and services,
the purchase of medications,
travel to and from treatment appointments,
return to work supports, and,
other costs associated with receiving the mental injury.

What constitutes a reasonable cost will be considered on a case by case basis. This is not a guarantee that payment of full costs will be received.

How do you claim provisional payments?

If you have experienced a mental injury, there are simple steps to apply for provisional payments.

Report mental injury to your employer

As with any work related incident, you should immediately report this to your employer. Make sure you keep a record of any reports you have made regarding the hazard such as OHS reports, incident reports, complaints to management or other correspondence notifying your employer of the risk.

Consider enlisting the assistance of support structures such as your union delegate or HSR.

Complete the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part A

WorkSafe’s Worker’s Injury Claim Form has been updated to reflect the new laws. After reporting the injury, you must complete the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part A, except for question 7. Question 7 will be completed by your employer once they have received the claim from you. You can download the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part A here.

Employer completes the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part A

Once receiving the form from you, the employer must complete the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part A within 3 business days of receiving the claim. This form will be submitted to the agent who is required to determine the eligibility of the worker within two business days of receiving the form.

Employer completes the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part B

The employer must complete the Worker’s Injury Claim Form Part B and any WorkSafe Certificates of Capacity within 10 business days of receiving the claim and submit this form to the Agent.

Once these steps have been completed, your employer's agent will decide if your claim is accepted or rejected.

What happens after the claim?

Accepted:

You will continue to receive payments in line with WorkCover legislation and may also be entitled to weekly payments if you are off work.

Rejected:

If your mental injury claim has been rejected, you will continue to be entitled to provisional payments for a period of up to 3 weeks.

If you wish to dispute the decision to reject your claim we recommend contacting:

See also:

WorkSafe information on Provisional Payments
WorkSafe posters on If you are injured at work

Last modified: 21/06/2021

The information on this website produced and distributed by the IWSN is of a general nature. We do our best to ensure the information is accurate and up to date, but cannot take any responsibility for any loss arising out of its use. You should not rely on it applying in your own circumstances and should always take further advice from those with appropriate qualifications.

Mental Injury Provisional Payments