One line in the panel's reasons undid its finding on 14 years of work
A Victorian court has quashed a medical panel opinion, finding the panel noted a supermarket worker's medical history but never worked through it.
The Supreme Court of Victoria delivered its judgment on August 19, 2026. It set aside a panel determination certified on July 3, 2025 and sent the medical questions back to be answered again by a differently constituted panel.
The worker started at Woolworths Group as a grocery team member on July 28, 2008 and stayed about 14 years, until his employment was terminated on September 30, 2022. The job was physical: splitting pallets of stock with both arms, loading roll cages, pushing them onto the shop floor and restocking shelves.
On July 9, 2021, he reported pain in his neck and left shoulder while pumping the handle of a pallet jack. Woolworths accepted that claim. It also accepted that his work that day was a significant contributing factor to aggravations of pre-existing injuries or diseases of his neck and left upper limb.
One question stayed live. Had the rest of the employment - the years of manual work either side of that shift - contributed to anything?
The panel found it had not. Listing what it had weighed, the panel referred to "the length of employment with no reported symptoms until the incident of 9 July 2021."
That sentence is what unravelled the determination.
The material before the panel included GP attendance records reaching back to 2013,...
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