Policy

Comparative coverage of these Acts including the MRCA is best summarised as a table which appears below (note this table does not include situations of aggravations under MRCA see 8.4.3 below):

New claims must, immediately upon receipt by the relevant location, be registered on Defcare. If the claimant has however not previously been registered with DVA, their details need to be entered onto aDVAnce. This will then upload the claimant on to Defcare and VIEW. Once the claimant is registered, the claim may be registered onto Defcare.  Instructions for this are located in the Defcare User Manual.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'benefit' in the following terms:

benefit n. a favourable or helpful factor or circumstance; advantage; profit.

The following circumstances can be said to involve a failure to obtain a benefit:

In fact, Delegates should not hesitate to apply directly to SAM for copies of all relevant medical documents from file, in cases where matters of diagnosis and date of onset of a condition are unclear, based on documentation provided by the employee. Cases have been known where employees have edited those medical documents which come into their possession, i.e. prior to passing these to the Delegate. Delegates may therefore choose to request ADF Health Records directly through a DOCTRACKER request to SAM, in all contentious cases involving diseases.

Investigation of the claim will require the Delegate to decide whether or not the medical diagnosis – i.e. the condition suffered by the claimant – constitutes an injury, a disease, an aggravation (i.e. of either an injury or a disease), or a sequela to another injury or disease. Each of these different classifications has significance for its administration under the appropriate Act.

'Sequelae' are medical conditions which, although a medical condition clearly distinguishable from the original injury, have nevertheless arisen as a progression of, or as a consequence of, the original injury. For instance, onset of osteoarthritis in a knee joint arising from an earlier traumatic injury to that knee or onset of a mental illness in response to pain and disability of that knee, are both medical sequelae.

Delegates should make an early provisional classification of the condition claimed, i.e. as a disease or injury. This should occur as early in the investigation as possible because the criteria for liability are different for injury and disease.

The distinction between injury and disease is common to all three of the Acts administered by the RCG and this is discussed at length at 10.1 – 10.3.

The Centre for Military and Veterans' Health (CMVH) was tasked with creating a hazard exposure profile for Australian Oberon Class submarines that were in service between 1967-2000 (all of which have now been decommissioned).

Tables 4 and 5, Appendix 5, in the resulting report detail the exposure profiles and level of evidence of the hazards identified in the project. These tables should be used as guidance when assessing a claim for a submariner who served

Medical reports provided by the client's representative are part of the case put on his/her behalf and the doctrine of 'natural justice' requires that the case put to the Delegate should at least be considered i.e. examined to assess its bearing on the case. Equally, the Delegate as the decision-maker is entitled to decide which of that material is relevant, credible, etc. and has an appropriate bearing on the final decision.

Note that it is possible for an injury to have 'arisen out of, or in the course of employment' even if the above special deeming provisions of S6(1)(b) do not apply to the journey in question.