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, an April 2021 CT scan referring to recurrent severe neck, left shoulder and left upper limb pain, a June 2021 CT noting two to three weeks of persistent left-sided cervical pain, and an MRI days after that. Woolworths had told the panel directly that the worker's neck and left arm pathology "was not asymptomatic prior to 9 July 2021," pointing to progress notes running from 2013 to 2021.
The judge called the panel's statement a clear factual error.
Woolworths defended the outcome on the basis that the panel had simply preferred the worker's own account. He had told the panel he had no neck symptoms before July 2021, and had given a similar account to an earlier panel in 2023. One medicolegal examiner recorded that he was vague about how long the pain had been present and concluded he was "an unreliable historian."
Woolworths won part of the argument. The court accepted that weighing competing accounts sits squarely within the panel's function, and agreed there was evidence the panel could rely on - so the claim that the finding had no evidentiary basis at all was not made out. That bar, the judge noted, is set very high.
Where the panel came unstuck was narrower. The court drew a distinction between recording evidence and engaging with it. The reasons contained no discussion allowing the court to trace how the panel moved from the medical file to a finding of no reported symptoms, which left the court attempting to fill gaps in the reasoning - something the judge said it could not do. The court also said some caution should be exercised in the weight given to the history the worker had provided.
The knock-on effects were structural. Having found employment across the full period was not a significant contributing factor, the panel marked several remaining questions "not applicable," including whether any current condition was materially contributed to by that broader employment. Questions on permanency and work capacity were never reached.
The court made the order the worker sought: the determination was quashed and remitted. It did not decide his serious injury application, made on October 19, 2023, which remains open. A separate ground arguing the panel's reasons were inadequate was not dealt with at length, the judge saying it was unnecessary given the first finding, while observing it was also open to conclude the reasons did not set out a logical path of reasoning.
