Introduction: Rehab Isn’t Always the “Safe” Part of a Claim
Rehabilitation is supposed to represent progress — the phase where recovery gains momentum and the worker moves closer to returning to work. But in reality, rehab can be physically demanding, rushed, poorly tailored, or outright unrealistic. Injuries during rehab are far more common than workers realize, and when they occur, they can fundamentally alter the trajectory of a claim.
Workers are almost never told that if an injury happens during a WCB-directed rehabilitation activity, the resulting harm is not just unfortunate — it is compensable. And although WCB rarely volunteers this information, the law is clear once you connect the policies and the extensive history of Appeals Commission decisions.
The Legal Framework: Why Rehab Injuries Are Compensable
There is no single sentence in the WCB policy manual saying “Rehab injuries must be accepted.” Instead, compensability comes from how several policies and the Appeals Commission’s jurisprudence work together.
Policy 02-01, which covers “Arising Out of and In the Course of Employment,” sets the test: Was the worker participating in an activity connected to the employment injury, and were they under WCB’s direction or authorization? If a worker is only in rehab because WCB required it, they meet this test.
Policies 04-02 and 04-06, which govern rehabilitation services and vocational rehabilitation, establish that rehab is a compensable service, that workers must participate in it when directed, and that WCB controls the provider, the program, and the expectations. The worker is placed in that environment solely because of their compensable accident.
Finally, the Appeals Commission has repeatedly ruled that a worker injured during a WCB-mandated rehab activity is “in the course of employment.” The Commission’s reasoning is simple: the worker would not have been there but for the original compensable injury and WCB’s direction. That is the legal foundation for compensability.
How Rehab Injuries Actually Occur
Rehab is rarely as gentle or controlled as WCB describes. Providers follow protocols that push workers to test their tolerance. WCB often encourages aggressive timelines, and therapists may misjudge the worker’s true physical limits. Workers, for their part, often push beyond their capacity out of fear of being labelled non compliant.
The result can be sudden injuries — such as a shoulder tearing during overhead exercises, a disc herniating during core strengthening, or a fall leading to fractures. Other times, the damage is more subtle but no less serious: an inflamed surgical site, a new nerve-related condition, or fresh symptoms arising from repetitive tasks in vocational rehabilitation.
Regardless of how they occur, these injuries happen within a WCB-controlled environment, during activitie the worker would never have been performing otherwise.
How WCB Often Responds — And Why It’s a Problem
Despite the legal clarity, WCB frequently downplays rehab injuries by labeling them “flare-ups.” It’s a convenient term because it acknowledges pain but denies responsibility. A flare-up, in WCB’s view, does not change entitlement, does not extend wage-loss, does not pause vocational rehabilitation, and does not require new diagnostics.
But a flare-up label doesn’t reflect reality when a worker’s function, symptoms, or physical baseline has genuinely deteriorated. The Appeals Commission has overturned many decisions where WCB tried to minimize significant injuries by dismissing them as temporary irritations. A real change in condition is not a flare-up — it is a compensable event.
WCB’s motivation for minimizing these injuries is practical: accepting them can disrupt timelines, derail RTW projects, require new medical investigations, and increase long-term entitlement. So workers must expect resistance even when they are legally entitled to full acceptance.
The Critical Importance of Immediate Reporting
Many workers undermine their own claims not because their injury wasn’t real, but because they minimized it in the moment. They feel embarrassed, or they don’t want to seem unmotivated, or they fear antagonizing WCB. They push through the pain and utter the words that later haunt them: “I’m fine. Let’s continue.”
Those words are the difference between acceptance and denial.
WCB relies heavily on the absence of immediate reporting to deny rehab injuries. If the therapist does not document the event, WCB will argue there was no identifiable incident, no acute change, and no connection to the rehab activity.
To protect themselves, workers must speak up immediately when something goes wrong. They must stop the activity, insist on an incident report, seek prompt medical assessment, and notify WCB in their own words — not through the therapist, who may underreport or soften what happened.
A clear, contemporaneous record is the strongest tool a worker has.
How a Rehab Injury Can Change the Entire Claim
A rehabilitation injury can dramatically reshape entitlement. A worker who was tolerating modified duties or slowly progressing through a return-to-work plan may suddenly find those duties impossible. When that happens, full wage-loss benefits often resume.
Medical treatment also changes. The new injury may require imaging, new investigations, specialist consultation, or alterations to the treatment plan. Vocational rehabilitation may have to pause entirely, because VR cannot proceed when a worker is medically unstable.
In some cases, the new injury increases the long-term functional impact of the compensable claim, which can affect future assessments, including ELP calculations. There may also be implications for Home Services or Personal Care Allowance if the new injury reduces independence or mobility. These ripple effects are precisely why WCB sometimes tries to minimize rehab injuries — because acknowledging them is expensive and disruptive.
The Bottom Line: Rehabilitation Injuries Are Part of the Claim
If you were injured during a WCB-directed rehabilitation activity, the injury is almost certainly compensable. The law supports you even if the first-line decision-maker does not. WCB may try to label the event a flare-up or claim it was unrelated, but the Appeals Commission has been unequivocal: injuries sustained under WCB’s direction and control occur in the course of employment.
Workers must protect themselves by reporting these injuries immediately, documenting them clearly, and refusing to let WCB bury the harm under vague terminology. Rehabilitation can help, but when it causes injury, it becomes part of the claim — and workers have every right to insist WCB treat it that way.