February 21, 2025
Rolf Harrison – Workers’ Advocate
IF YOU GET INJURED on the job, your employer will likely offer you modified duties, presenting you with the choice of accepting or refusing. Injured workers sometimes run into trouble in this situation, particularly when they are too injured to perform the modified duties. Problems can arise if workers refuse, but the Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB – also known as WorkSafeBC) says the modified duties are suitable and threatens to deny wage loss.
It’s not a pleasant process but there are things you can do to proactively avoid problems or get the WCB to reconsider.
When your employer offers you modified duties, you have the right to seek medical advice before you respond. The WCB should be paying you wage loss benefits in the meantime.
It’s important to seek medical advice as soon as possible. If you can’t get an appointment with a doctor promptly, keep your employer and the WCB updated about the delay. You are obligated to maintain communication with your employer and the WCB about early and safe return to work and to assist your employer if they ask you, in identifying suitable modified duties.
If available, bring a description of the modified duties to the doctor. Ask questions. Are the modified duties within your current functional abilities and medical restrictions? Will they harm or slow your recovery? These are important issues to explore.
If your doctor verbally advises you not to perform the modified duties, ask them to write that down in the paperwork for the employer / WCB, with the reasons why. Just because you’ve had a conversation about it doesn’t mean they will document it. Busy physicians, especially those in emergency rooms and walk-in clinics, often lack the time to document these details.
Return to the doctor’s if they haven’t documented their opinion adequately. It shouldn’t be this way, but the WCB may not accept a doctor’s report that just says: “no modified duties”. Some WCB case managers will proudly ignore a medical decision if there’s nothing in writing that proves your doctor understood the nature of the modified duties or provided specific medical reasons advising against them.
Ideally, you can respond to your employer’s offer based on a medical opinion that refers to the specific modified duties being offered. The WCB generally accepts that you’re entitled to rely on an informed medical opinion when deciding whether to accept or deny modified duties. But if you refuse an offer based only on your personal belief that it will harm your recovery, as correct as you may be, there’s a high risk the WCB will deny wage loss. That could mean denying your wage loss for a few days, or perhaps, for many months.
Where you and your employer cannot agree regarding suitability, you can ask the WCB to intervene. Raise with the WCB all the reasons why the modified duties may not be suitable.
Remember, modified duties must be safe, productive, within your functional abilities and medical restrictions, and they must be work that you have the competencies to perform. The duties cannot be tasks that your employer wouldn’t pay an uninjured worker to do.
And the process is the same if you’re already at work performing modified duties. You have the right and the obligation to not perform work that you have reasonable cause to believe is unsafe. You’re entitled to seek updated medical advice regarding the suitability of the modified duties as circumstances change. If you’re at a work camp or a remote worksite, you have the right to travel offsite to consult a physician about modified duties and other aspects of your care.
If in the end the WCB determines that you unreasonably refused modified duties and denies wage loss, you can ask them to reconsider. If that doesn’t work, you can start a review of the decision letter within the deadline. Workers win a high percentage of these appeals, but unfortunately, it will take at least four to five months to get a review decision back.
By Rolf Harrison
Workers’ Advocate