Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of biomedical and actuarial paradigms in the context of Australian injury insurance and compensation schemes, and the impact of these paradigms on people disabled through traffic or workplace injury.

Paper long abstract:

In Australia, accident and injury insurance and compensation schemes are subject to complicated and at times contradictory rafts of state and federal legislation. Within this complex legislative environment, resources needed by people who have been injured are subject to biomedical and organisational gatekeeping. While reductionist biomedical and insurance paradigms can speak quite comfortably with each other, they are often unable to articulate well with the complex needs of people with ongoing disability acquired as a result of an injury. Bodies, especially injured bodies, are dynamic. They change and shift over time in ways that injury compensation schemes sometimes struggle to accommodate. Injured bodies are situated within networks of families, friends and co-workers. Biomedical and actuarial frameworks posited around autonomously individuated clients are structurally unable to take account of some aspects of their clients' needs. This paper explores some of the structural barriers to care created by biomedical and actuarial paradigms, and some of the ways in which organisations in the Australian insurance and compensation industry are attempting to address these barriers.