When Dame Carol Black visited Australia in 2010, she was a generous and enthusiastic ally for our Health Benefits of Good Work agenda. One thing she said has stayed with me. She told us what she was hearing back in the UK: that around 85% of employers felt doctors weren't doing enough to get people back to work — and roughly the same proportion of doctors felt employers weren't doing enough either. Two camps, each waiting for the other to move.

That dynamic hasn't disappeared. It still plays out in workplaces, consulting rooms and claims teams every day. And it points to something more fundamental. Most of us, most of the time, are simply unaware of the influence we have over what happens to an injured person. We underestimate our role. We wait. And while we're waiting, the window for effective action quietly closes.

Professor Michael Nicholas and his colleagues changed that understanding for many of us. His work on psychosocial factors made it impossible to look away. The evidence that the trajectory of an injury and a claim is modifiable is now irrefutable. What happens to people is not fixed at the moment of injury. It is shaped by how quickly someone is contacted, by whether their employer stays engaged, by the messages they receive from their treating practitioners, by whether the people around them believe recovery is possible.

We can shift what happens to people. The question is how. What do we change? What do we act on first?

Waiting for outcomes to tell us isn't good enough. By the time a poor outcome is visible in the data — a claim that has run long, a worker who has disengaged, a return to work that never happened — it's already too late to prevent it. The outcome is a record of what we failed to do earlier. If we have genuine faith in early data, and we should, then we need to measure, monitor, understand and act on every modifiable factor we can identify.

That doesn't mean trying to change everything at once. It means starting with the most important factors and being honest with ourselves that, for different people, in different circumstances, those factors will differ. A small employer managing their first serious claim has different leverage points than a large self-insurer with a dedicated RTW team. A GP seeing a worker 3 days post-injury has a different influence than a claims manager reviewing a file at the 3-month mark. Context shapes what matters most.

That's what the next few months are about for us at RTWMatters. The value and opportunity of lead indicators — the early signals that tell you where a claim is heading before the outcome data confirms it, and while you can still do something about it. High-performing employers use them. High-performing schemes use them. High-performing clinicians use them.

It's time to talk about why and what it looks like when you get it right. We hope this series gives you both the evidence and the impetus to act.