WorkSafe Victoria is offering up to $1.25 million for organisations to redesign return to work

WorkSafe Victoria has published a call for its Return to Work Innovation Trials, offering successful organisations up to $1.25 million to design and evaluate new return to work approaches. The framing is deliberate. WorkSafe describes return to work as complex and calls for new ways of thinking, positioning the funding as a research and evaluation program rather than a compliance exercise. Applications close on Sunday 6 September 2026. The dollar figure is worth noting. A typical WorkSafe Victoria grant round sits in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, so this round is roughly four times larger per participant. It is also the first psychosocial-relevant funding call above $1 million issued by a state regulator since the NSW Code of Practice became enforceable on 1 July 2026. This is a separate program from the four psychological injury prevention trials WorkSafe announced in August 2026. Those trials were an internal research investment in redesigning prevention measures, with no public application process. This round is a competitive funding call, open to external applicants, and specific to return to work rather than prevention. It is also distinct from the Queensland work on suitable duties documents, which concerns evidence held for an individual claim rather than a funded research program. The analytical point is about what a funded trial is measured against. An organisation inside a regulator-funded return to work trial is judged on program evidence, not on compliance artefacts alone. Over a multi-year evaluation it will be expected to produce baseline metrics, records of how controls were implemented, a mid-trial review, an outcome evaluation and a final report. That is a continuous, dated evidence trail with named owners and scheduled review points, not a single point-in-time document. A documentation layer that already records named hazards, control owners, review dates and monitoring results maps directly onto that program-evidence requirement. The practical takeaway is not tied to the 6 September deadline. Most organisations will not apply. The ones that should act are those that want to hold, now, the same evidence trail a funded participant would need to produce: contemporaneous records of what controls were in place, who owned them, when they were reviewed and what the monitoring showed.