4.2.1 Date of Injury

The date the injury occurred is used in several ways:

• to ensure the injury did not occur prior to the commencement of compensation coverage of Defence Force personnel by the Commonwealth Employees' Compensation Act 1930 (the 1930 Act) on 3 January 1949,
• to validate the date of assessment, the date the impairment became permanent and the date the impairment became stable – all of which cannot occur prior to the date of injury;
• to determine whether the injury falls within the relevant dates for SIA eligibility (see Chapter 3); and    to determine whether the threshold for entitlement in hearing loss cases (for example) is a binaural hearing loss of 20% (date of injury is before 1 October 2001) or 5% (date of injury is on or after 1 October 2001, or exposure to noise in service continued after that date).

The date of injury is automatically seeded for the initial PI investigation from the liability claim. If it is incorrect, the delegate should ensure that it is corrected both in R&C ISH and in the Defcare system.

If the PI Assessment is being conducted concurrently with the liability assessment this field will remain blank until liability is accepted.