Saffioti and Comcare (Compensation)

This matter concerned an appeal by the applicant, Ms Saffioti, against a decision by Comcare to deny her claim for compensation. The applicant had commenced employment with the Department of Defence in 2001 and, by 2008, her role involved increasingly demanding purchasing duties. While there was contemporaneous evidence supporting the applicant's assertion of high workloads and staff shortages between 2008 and 2012, and the respondent accepted she worked long hours, the central dispute was whether these workplace conditions caused or contributed to her subsequent delusional disorder. The applicant claimed she experienced significant stress, burnout, and anxiety due to her workload, which she alleged unmasked her condition. Comcare, however, disputed that workplace stress was the cause. The decision was made by Senior Member D O'Donovan.

The primary legal issue before the Tribunal was whether the applicant's delusional disorder was an ailment that was contributed to, to a significant degree, by her employment. This required the Tribunal to determine if the workplace stress experienced by the applicant between 2011 and 2013 was an instigator or played a role in unmasking her condition, or if the condition was of a different origin. A significant challenge in assessing the evidence was the applicant's delusional disorder itself, which affected her recollection of events, leading her to recall and report occurrences that the Tribunal was satisfied did not happen.

The Tribunal approached the applicant's descriptions of her emotional states with caution, particularly where they were not corroborated by contemporaneous documents and emerged only after her condition deteriorated. The Tribunal found that the applicant's delusional disorder had the consequence of distorting her memory and reporting of events. Crucially, the Tribunal noted that the applicant's condition emerged not during periods of intense work, but following an extended period of leave and after a Christmas break, in February 2014. In the absence of a temporal connection between workplace stress and the onset of her illness, the Tribunal was not satisfied that the workplace stress experienced between 2011 and 2013 was an instigator or played any role in unmasking her condition. The Tribunal concluded that the applicant's delusional disorder was constitutional in origin and not contributed to, to a significant degree, by her employment.

Accordingly, the Tribunal affirmed the decision under review, finding that workplace stress did not play a role in triggering the applicant's delusional disorder.