About Episodes
When work changes a life, what happens next?
Most Australians assume that if they are seriously injured at work, help will be there when they need it. But what happens after injury?
Over three years, we travelled across Australia speaking with injured workers, families, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, employers, researchers and policymakers to better understand one of the most important, yet least understood, experiences in Australian life: recovery.
What began as a single documentary became a four-part series exploring the human journey that follows workplace injury.
Each episode asks a different question.
Origins — Why were these systems created, and who controls what happens after injury?
Care — What helps or hinders recovery?
Value — What can compensation recognise, and what can it never replace?
Learning — What does meaningful reform require?
Together, these stories move beyond workplace injury to explore something universal: how we respond when lives change unexpectedly, and what people need from one another to rebuild.
Recovery is rarely experienced alone. It is shaped by families, workplaces, communities and the everyday acts of connection that help people move forward. Because for many families, the injury is only the beginning.
DROPPING IN 2027
All four episodes of Shattered. Stream the complete series.
Workplace Previews
Four short videos in which the director speaks to camera, introducing each episode and the questions it invites workplaces to discuss.
Episode 1: Workplace Preview
Origins of Control - Now Accepting Screening Bookings For October 2026
Episode 2: Workplace Preview
Doctor, Doctor - Releasing October 2026
Episode 3: Workplace Preview
The Punishment of Money - Releasing December 2026
Episode 4: Workplace Preview
Royal Commissions Examined - Coming February 2027
About Shattered Docuseries
Shattered began with one question: what happens after someone is injured at work?
A three-year investigation revealed that no single film could adequately examine the system—or the consequences of injury for a person’s health, family, work, identity and future.
The investigation also opened distinct but connected areas requiring further research, including psychological injury, psychosocial safety, mental health care, treatment, compensation and the changing world of work.
The result is a four-part documentary series. Each episode examines a different part of what happens after injury—how these systems began, what recovery requires, how money and work shape people’s choices, and whether institutions learn from the harm already done.
Together, the episodes prompt us to reflect: when work changes a life, how should we respond?
Episode 1: Origins of Control
When work changes a life, what happens next?
Australia created workers’ compensation systems around a humane promise: people harmed through work should not face the consequences alone.
Beginning in Lithgow, Origins of Control traces how dangerous work, family loss, mutual aid and collective action helped turn that promise into law. Lithgow provides the historical foundation for the episode—but it is where the investigation begins, not where it ends.
From there, the film moves into the present to examine how control over evidence, treatment, income, capacity and decisions can shift away from injured people and their families.
Through Australian social history, expert insight and lived experience, the episode explores what happens when care, employment, evidence and liability become entangled. It asks how necessary scrutiny and financial responsibility can coexist with timely treatment, dignity and personal agency.
The experiences of five women—a lawyer, a nurse, the partner of a police officer living with psychological injury, a former real estate property manager and a former injured worker who became an advocate—bring this question into the present. Their circumstances differ, but each reveals how the consequences of injury can extend beyond the person named on the claim and into families, workplaces and professional lives.
Origins of Control does not argue that every employer, insurer, practitioner or decision is the same. It asks a more difficult question:
Can a system exercise necessary control without taking control away from the person whose life has changed?
The original promise was simple: when work changes a life, no one should face what happens afterwards alone.
Episode 2: Doctor Doctor
When care matters most.
When people are injured at work, seeing a doctor is no longer a simple act of care. They may become claimants whose health, capacity and account are examined within workplace, insurance and legal systems.
Doctor Doctor explores psychological injury and psychosocial safety after workplace harm. Through doctors, psychologists and people with lived experience, it shows treating practitioners trying to support a person through systems intended to aid recovery. Their care can sit alongside independent medical assessments that reach different conclusions, leaving someone managing pain, trauma or cognitive effects caught between competing opinions.
The episode does not suggest every workplace, practitioner or decision is the same. It asks how people within a system can preserve trust, dignity and timely care.
Workplaces are not spectators. Involving insurers, lawyers or assessors does not remove an employer’s responsibility to avoid further harm. When someone is seriously unwell, employers must consider how investigation, escalation and adversarial processes may affect them. Recovery may not mean returning to the same workplace. It may require distance or another safe path, supported by respectful communication and genuine consultation.
Doctor Doctor asks:
If psychosocial safety matters before injury, why should it end when injury occurs?
Episode 3: The Punishment of Money
Returning to Work in A World Being Rewritten.
Money is meant to protect people when injury takes away their capacity to earn. Yet financial support can also become pressure when entitlement depends on demonstrating incapacity while recovery is measured by increasing capacity.
The Punishment of Money examines the changing relationship between compensation, cognitive impairment through workplace injury, work and human value. A rehabilitation assessment may identify what someone can do. It cannot create a real, suitable and sustainable job. During months or years away, roles change, skills date and artificial intelligence is reshaping the labour market.
Through injured people and families, employers, rehabilitation professionals, researchers and legal and financial experts, the episode explores how processes concerned with liability, income and return to work can pull workers and workplaces apart—even when both want recovery to succeed. Does the system design marry with the intention?
Work can restore income, purpose, identity and connection. But return to work cannot be treated as an administrative target. It may require safe and useful work, flexibility, retraining, continued connection and time.
Money can fund treatment, replace earnings and recognise loss. It cannot return lost years, ongoing harm, restore health or recreate the future someone expected. If capacity is not the same as opportunity, how can workplaces and compensation systems create a genuine path back to a meaningful working life?
Episode 4: Royal Commissions Examined
What happens after the findings? Coming February 2027.
Royal Commissions Examined asks what happens after inquiries report, recommendations are made and reform is promised.
Drawing on public records, expert evidence and lived experience, the final episode considers what meaningful institutional learning and accountability require.
Bringing together the questions raised throughout Shattered, Episode Four examines whether reform is reflected in the lives of the people the system is intended to serve.
Further details will be released closer to the premiere of Episode 4.
The Journey
To understand this story, we travelled across Australia — from courtrooms and parliamentary precincts to regional communities, memorial sites and places shaped by workplace injury, loss and recovery.
Testimonials
Workers' Compensation has destroyed lives; too many have lost hope and have taken their own lives, others have withdrawn into themselves of broken heart and spirit. We must all stand and say enough. It's time to change that story and all of us start to care.
Rosemary McKenzie-Ferguson Suma comp Laude
Founder Craigs Table
I attended the audience testing screening. Thank you so much. Bravo for this documentary series. As a small business owner I had not really thought about this, except the cost of premiums. I need to do more to ensure safety is front and centre of our business.
Jo
You think that 'workcover' is for the workers but it loses its way.
Ros
This docuseries is a powerful piece of knowledge to advocate for people struggling with abuse in the workfield and workers compensation. Watching this series will trigger parts of you who were forced physically or emotionally to be quietened. This docu series is powerful and eye opening to the hidden voices around the workplace and workers compensation. Thank you all who advocated your voice for the rest of us who can't.
Adian Jackson
The true measure of a system's health is how it treats people when they are most vulnerable.
Jody
I didn't know much about this system. It's frightening to learn what can happen to people after a workplace injury.
Ben
The history was fascinating. But isn't it time we modernised the way we support people after workplace injury?
Elizabeth
What do GP's think about all of this? They must find it heartbreaking to see what some of their patients go through.
James