In this video, Bourke Legal Director and Personal Injury Lawyer, Pania Watt talks about how you can take care of yourself and your compensation claim.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Pania Watt, and I’m a director at Bourke Legal. I’m here to talk to you today about how to take care of yourself and your compensation claim. We understand that running a compensation claim can be difficult.
When you’re suffering from an injury or an illness, you’re having a difficult time. You can have a lot of pressures on you, whether those pressures are financial, in your relationships, or in respect of pain and disability.
It’s our job to ensure that you maximise your entitlements and that you understand your rights to compensation in the scheme that you’re under. In order for us to help you and to make sure that your claim goes according to plan, you need to take care of yourself.
Taking care of your claim means taking your claim seriously. Don’t compromise your claim by saying, for example, that you’re unable to run as a result of your injury and then continuing to play footy at the local football club on weekends.
Be mindful and be truthful with what has happened, and there won’t be any problems. When you make a claim for compensation, whether it’s a physical or a mental injury, it’s an unfortunate fact that you can be subjected to surveillance.
Of course, you’re not going to know when surveillance is being conducted of you. You need to be truthful about what you can and can’t do, and you need to be mindful. Surveillance is not just a person following you around in their car or sitting outside your house taking photographs of you while you take your bins out.
Surveillance can also be desktop surveillance, and this is where an investigator combs the internet looking for all mention of you on any form of social media. Social media use is very prevalent these days, and it’s one of the easiest ways that insurers can obtain information about you.
You need to be very careful and mindful of how you are portrayed either on your own social media or on somebody else’s social media. You need to treat anything that you decide to post on social media as being a letter directly to the insurer, because that is, in essence, what it is.
Taking care of yourself during your claim means keeping the lines of communication open with your treatment team. Your treatment team is your GP, your specialist, which could be your psychiatrist or your specialist treating doctor, and making sure that you are letting them know if there is anything that you need or anything that you’re having trouble with in relation to your claim.
Your treatment team is in your corner and they are here to help you, so you need to speak up and advocate for yourself so that they can advocate for you as well. Finally, taking care of yourself also means keeping the lines of communication open with us, your lawyers.
If you are not sure about something and you suspect it might affect your claim, just call us. The lines need to be open at all times and we’re here to help you.