Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Warren Forster: ACC Lawyer on the economic cost of injuries, lost productivity

Transcript

Warren Forster: ACC Lawyer on the economic cost of injuries, lost productivity · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Now to the latest ACEC injury report, a bit of
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: a stark picture of just how clumsy we are and
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: how much it's costing. In twenty twenty five, New Zealand
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: saw twenty million injury related days away from work. That's
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: like the entirety of Nelson being off work for a
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: whole year, and it cost us in our productivity. It
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: cost us eight point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: five alone. So to talk about this, I'm joining now
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: by Warren Forster, who is an a sec lawyer and researcher.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Good morning to your Warren.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Good morning.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Are we comsy, are we reckless? Or are we just
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: blase about the cost?
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Well, it's hard to know exactly that the number of
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: injuries that are not from work and motor vehicles has
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: increased massivefully over the last decades. But ultimately what's really
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: positive about this is that we're actually now saying this
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: is the cost of productivity loss. So that's a really
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: wonderful shift in the acc response to this problem, which
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: is as a society, this is costing us, so what
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: are we going to do about it? And that's a
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: really important conversation to have.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Who's rotting. This is it asked the people or is
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: it the clinicians who go, Haha, I can get my
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: bills paid.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Well, there's a few different aspects to this, and there's
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: treatment providers, there's us as members of the public, there's ACC,
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: and there's employees. We've all got a role to plan this.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: But the critical thing is that rehabilitation, which is getting
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: all of those people together and getting someone back to work,
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: is critical. And ACC had a computer system they designed
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: and implemented in twenty nineteen where effectively they stopped doing
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: that and they're only just starting to do it again.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So it's a failure to rehabilitate that's really created these problems.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: We've now said, actually, this has costing us a lot
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: of money. What are we going to do about it?
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: And that's an important conversation to have, and it's not
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: just a case of blaming one. We need to get
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: rue involved together. That's the key idea.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big statistic out of it, sixty five
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: percent of us and making another claim within two years.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: So we don't do a good enough job at rehabilitation.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And there's a report came out earlier in
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: the year that was pretty much buried, and it basically
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: said ACC hasn't done rehabilitation properly for the last five
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: or six years, and that's the key failure. So there's
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: about forty two thousand people have been exited from ACC
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: in the last five years, and very few of them
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: have been rehabilitated. And that's exactly what we're seeing now,
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: is that we've seen people coming back onto the scheme,
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: long term problems coming forward because we haven't got it
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: right at the beginning. And that's a critical message for
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: all of us, is that ACC is something that we
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: are all part of, whether we like it or not,
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: and what we have to do is figure out how
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: to actually make that work. Because the idea behind the
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: scheme now more than fifty years ago, was let's get
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: rehabilitation right, let's focus on that and then we'll all
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: be better off. And now we're actually naming the economic
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: costs and billions of dollars. It brings a focus for
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: us back to if we're going to save costs to
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: our society by having a scheme, which is exactly why
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: we have a SEC how do we all get together
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: and make this work. And that's where we really need
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: strong leadership. We need move away from exits and actually
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: focus on rehabilitation because that's where the cost saving as
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: the society is going to be.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Larn thank you so much for waking up early for us.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: We're enforcement at a SEC lawyer and researcher.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, Listen live
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: to News Talks it Be from five am weekdays, or
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: follow the podcast on iHeartRadio