Factors Associated with the Timing of Initial Visit to Healthcare Providers for Injured Workers with Low Back Pain Claims: A Multijurisdiction Retrospective Cohort.

The data come from 2011 to 2015, so scheme policies and workforce arrangements may have changed since. Only workers' compensation funded services were counted. A worker who paid privately or used Medicare for an early GP or physiotherapy visit before lodging the claim does not appear, so the recorded wait may be longer than the worker's real wait. The database has no measure of how bad the back pain was. Workers are all required to have been off work for at least ten days, but someone in severe pain and someone with mild persistent pain are treated the same, and pain severity is a likely reason for seeking care sooner. Everyone in the study was off work for at least ten days and on workers' compensation, so the findings do not apply to workers who keep working or who are not claiming. Only Western Australia and South Australia were analysed. Victoria was excluded because its employer medical excess policy is not captured in the database. The analysis censored time at 30 days, so it cannot describe the wait for the small group who took longer than that to be seen.

The funding statement names Monash University. The paper reports no other conflict of interest declarations.

Do not read the time ratio of 2.12 for MSK therapists as a doubling of the wait. The median difference was 3 days versus 5 days, a two day gap, and the authors note it was statistically significant but small. The ratio also compares workers who chose to see an MSK therapist first with those who saw a GP first, two groups that may differ in ways the model cannot capture.