WorkSafe Victoria has named eight Recovery through Work grant recipients and launched the next return to work trials

On 7 October, WorkSafe Victoria announced a milestone for its Return to Work Innovations program: eight organisations have been named as recipients of the Recovery through Work grants, and the latest Return to Work Innovation Trials have been launched, offering up to $1.25 million per initiative. WorkSafe says it is looking forward to seeing how these projects help injured workers recover and return to safe, meaningful work sooner. This blog has followed the program from the start. On 3 September it covered the original $1.25 million funding call, and on 24 September it covered the first explicitly AI-based project under the trials. What is new is the scale of the announcement. A named group of grant recipients and a fresh round of trials mean the regulator is no longer only describing return to work as a problem. It is paying for new approaches and expecting them to be evaluated. That matters for any employer, not only those who applied. When a regulator funds trials in an area, the practice it is testing tends to shape what good looks like. The trials sit alongside the point WHS Queensland made in the same fortnight, that psychological recovery is part of recovery, and that secondary psychological injury can build during rehabilitation if a worker feels unsupported or left out of decisions. Victoria is funding the search for better answers to the same problem. The practical read is to look at your own return to work records as if someone were going to evaluate them. Can you show who made first contact with the injured worker and when? Is there a return to work plan the worker helped shape, with the reasons for each duty recorded? Is there a named owner and a review date, and a note of what changed at each review? Those are the records a trial would need to measure anything, and they are the same records that show you managed the risk if a claim is ever tested. WorkSafe has not published what the funded projects will find. What an employer can do now is make sure the evidence of its own approach exists before anyone asks for it.