What the New SIRA Claim Form Tells Us About Where Psychological Injury Claims Are Going

Dr Anna Kiaos — Founder, Mind Culture Life Australia | Academic Researcher of Organisational Culture, Psychosocial Risk and Mental Health

A claim form is never just a form. It is a map of what the system intends to examine — and when the form changes, it tells you where the system is going before the case law does.

From 1 August 2026, workers in New South Wales lodging a psychological injury claim complete a substantially redesigned SIRA claim form. Most of the commentary on the NSW reforms has focused on thresholds and entitlements. However, when I sit with the form itself — as someone who has spent years investigating complex psychological injuries — you can read the future of this area of practice in its questions. Four shifts stand out.

1. Conduct is now the gateway

Under the reformed regime, a primary psychological injury is compensable only where it was caused by a 'relevant event': an act or threat of violence, serious criminal conduct, witnessing a traumatic incident, vicarious trauma — or bullying, sexual harassment, racial harassment or excessive work demands.

For those last four categories, the form does something new: it requires the worker to particularise the conduct. What happened. How many times. Who was involved. Who witnessed it. Whether it was reported, to whom, and why any delay occurred. Whether SafeWork, the police or another agency has been contacted.

Read that as an evidentiary architecture and the implication is immediate: liability in conduct-based psychological injury claims will turn on whether particularised workplace conduct occurred. That is not a question a medical assessment answers. It is a question an investigation answers. The independent medical examination tells the insurer what condition the worker has; the investigation establishes the events the claim now legally depends upon. The reformed form quietly moves factual investigation from the periphery of psychological injury claims to their centre.

2. One claim can now open a whole workplace

The form asks whether the incident has been reported to SafeWork NSW or another agency. That single question formalises something practitioners have been watching for several years: the convergence of the compensation system and the work health and safety regulator.

A conduct-based claim is no longer only a claim. It is a documented allegation that a psychosocial hazard existed at an identified site — precisely the subject matter of the psychosocial provisions employers have been subject to since 2022. Employers should assume that the same particulars a worker writes on a claim form can arrive, through one channel or another, at the regulator's desk. The claim is individual; the exposure is organisational. Thus, the organisation's culture is on notice.

3. Matters will run in more than one forum

The form also asks whether proceedings have been commenced in another court or tribunal. Conduct-based psychological injury claims increasingly travel with companions: a Fair Work application, a discrimination complaint, sometimes a police matter. Each forum asks a slightly different question about the same events. For lawyers, this multiplies the value of a rigorous, procedurally fair factual record established early — and of expert evidence on the organisational side of the matter: the adequacy of policies, complaint handling, and what a reasonable employer would have done.

4. The interview just became the hardest part

Here is the shift the form cannot show but certainly implies. Workers describing sexual harassment, bullying or racial harassment are being asked to give detailed written and oral accounts of experiences many found difficult to report at all — the form even asks them to explain any delay in reporting. Anyone who has sat across from a claimant in these matters knows what that asks of a person.

Evidence quality in the new regime will depend on interviewing skill. Trauma-informed practice — interviewing that puts witnesses at ease without leading them — is no longer a soft skill in investigation work. It is the difference between a statement that stands up and a statement that falls apart, and between a process that is procedurally fair and one that compounds the harm it is examining.

The pattern behind the paperwork

There is one more thing the form cannot ask, but which everyone working in this space should hold in mind. Psychological injury claims cluster. Across my investigative casework, the same observation recurs: claims arrive from the same teams, the same divisions, the same sites — different individuals, different clinical labels, the same cultural environment. The new form will document conduct claim by claim, in more detail than ever before. But each form is still completed by one worker, about one series of events.

For employers, that is the real message of the reform era. Every particularised claim is a data point about a workplace culture — and cultures that produce one conduct-based claim rarely stop at one. The organisations that fare best under the new regime will not be the ones with the best paperwork. They will be the ones that treated the first claim, or better still the conditions before the first claim, as a diagnostic signal about the culture itself.

The form has changed because the question has changed — from 'what happened to this worker?' toward 'what was this workplace like?'. Employers, insurers, lawyers and investigators would all do well to get ahead of the second question. It is the one the system is learning to ask.

Dr Anna Kiaos is the Founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, a licensed workplace investigator, and a researcher on organisational culture and psychosocial risk at UNSW Sydney. She

prepares expert reports in psychological injury matters, and works with organisations to diagnose the cultural conditions that produce harm.

This article is general commentary on a publicly available form and reform framework. It is not legal advice, and it does not refer to any individual claim or matter.