What happened: The NSW Supreme Court set aside a medical appeal panel's impairment assessment of an injured rail worker after finding arithmetic errors, ignored findings and a failure to conduct its own evaluation.
Who's involved: Speno Rail Maintenance Australia, the injured worker, and the Medical Appeal Panel of the Personal Injury Commission.
What's at stake: The difference between 18% and 21% whole person impairment - which determines whether the worker receives weekly compensation for the rest of his working life.
Why it matters: Claims managers handling impairment disputes face a clear warning that appeal panels must use their own current findings, not rubber-stamp old ones.
Where it stands: The Appeal Panel decision was set aside on October 12, 2026, and remitted to a differently constituted panel.
The panel's own doctor measured the gap. He noted the injured worker's right leg was 2cm shorter than his left - a "very significant number," the panel's findings recorded, because it crosses the threshold from zero impairment to 3% whole person impairment. Then the Appeal Panel issued its certificate.
The leg length discrepancy was nowhere in the final score.
That omission was one of several errors identified by the NSW Supreme Court in a decision handed down on October 12, 2026, that set aside a Medical Appeal Panel's assessment of permanent impairment for an injured rail maintenance worker employed by Speno Rail Maintenance Australia.
The worker was hurt in July 2018 when he tripped and fell while moving out of the path of a truck that had run out of control on railway tracks. He injured his right knee and later developed a consequential right hip injury. He underwent a knee replacement in 2020, but it did not provide relief. A revision surgery followed in July 2021. He has been unable to work since, relying on weekly compensation payments, daily pain medication and a walking stick.
The original medical assessor certified the worker's whole person impairment - a percentage that drives both lump-sum payouts and whether weekly payments continue - at 18%. The worker appealed, pointing to range-of-motion measurements he said were physiologically impossible, pain symptoms he said the assessor had recorded inconsistently with his actual condition, and a scarring assessment that did not match the photographic evidence.
The Appeal Panel ordered a fresh clinical examination by one of its own medical assessors. His findings were detailed. He measured the worker's leg length discrepancy at between 1.5cm and 2cm. A full-length standing scan confirmed it at 2cm - and the examiner noted that even that figure understated the true shortening because the scan did not account for a fixed bend in the right knee that effectively made the leg shorter still.
Under the workers' compensation guidelines, a discrepancy of 2cm or more adds 3% to the impairment score. Below 2cm, it adds nothing. The examiner himself called the 2cm figure "very significant."
The Appeal Panel's certificate did not include any impairment for leg length discrepancy. It gave no reasons for the omission.
That was not all. The panel assessed the knee replacement result as "fair" under the rating guidelines, which fixes the starting point at exactly 20% whole person impairment. But the certificate recorded 19% - a figure that does not exist in the table. After deducting one-tenth for a pre-existing condition, it arrived at 17%. The correct arithmetic from 20% minus one-tenth is 18%. Adding the 1% the panel itself had assessed for scarring should have produced 19%, not the 18% it certified.
The court was direct. The panel had also adopted a points rating from a different doctor's assessment conducted more than three years earlier, without explaining why its own examiner's materially different measurements did not change the score. It had failed to assess pain, stability, extension lag or alignment - all required categories under the rating table. And it had not assessed the referred hip injury at all, despite the worker having raised it in his grounds of appeal.
The stakes were not abstract. Under the NSW workers' compensation legislation, a worker loses entitlement to weekly payments after 260 weeks unless their whole person impairment exceeds 20%. The worker's case was that his impairment should have been assessed at no less than 21%. The panel's certificate said 18%.
The difference was a lifetime of weekly payments.
Speno Rail Maintenance argued the worker's appeal grounds were narrower than he claimed, confined to range of motion rather than a wholesale reassessment. The court disagreed. It noted that Speno Rail Maintenance itself had conceded in written submissions that the worker's appeal "suggested that the findings recorded ... were unreliable and that the assessments relating to the knee, hip and scarring all required review and reassessment."
The court found it "inconceivable" that the panel's own examining doctor, who had physically examined the worker, did not appreciate the full scope of what was in dispute. It described the suggestion that the worker had failed to articulate his case as "a wholly unacceptable triumph of form over substance."
The Appeal Panel decision was set aside and the matter remitted to a differently constituted panel.
An appeal panel that measures a threshold discrepancy, records it, and then omits it from the certificate without explanation has - in the court's analysis - failed to do its job. For claims managers and scheme agents handling whole person impairment disputes in NSW, the practical consequence is clear: the insurer is back at square one.
This decision was handed down by the NSW Supreme Court on October 12, 2026. The matter has been remitted to the Personal Injury Commission for reassessment by a differently constituted Appeal Panel. No final determination of the worker's whole person impairment has yet been made.
