The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is forcing many disabled workers into crisis over their health care.
The WSIB’s “Better at Work” initiative aggressively pushes injured workers back to work against the advice of their treating doctors. The WSIB also ignores doctors’ treatment recommendations, claiming that it is not necessary health care.
The result is devastating. Injured workers cannot get the treatment and time to heal that their doctors say they need. They are falling into poverty, unemployment, ill-health and mental instability.
The WSIB is supposed to objectively determine health care entitlements. However, Ron Ellis, former chair of the independent appeals tribunal concluded the WSIB has a culture of “proactive denial” and that the WSIB’s “adjudicative factual findings are routinely not evidence-based.”
Injured workers groups, immigrant rights groups, health care providers, legal clinics, labour organizations, private bar advocates, and concerned community members are calling for change.
The Ontario government must pass legislation to ensure that people injured at work can follow the advice of their doctors.