The Personal Injuries Assessment Board - the State body that assesses personal injuries claims - is introducing a new mediation service and changing its name to the Injuries Resolution Board.
It has also published a new study showing that claims from workplace accidents fell by more than a third in the three years to 2022.
Chief Executive of the Injuries Resolution Board Rosalind Carroll has said the new service will mean more claims can be dealt with, such as employer liability.
In this area, she said: "35% of the claims were leaving our systems before we ever got a chance to look at them.
"And that's because issues that we weren't able to deal with, such as liability and so on, weren't able to be explored or you weren't able to simply just talk about the issue.
"It was a paper-based process. So, what this does is open up an absolutely new area and a new opportunity for us to keep more claims within the system. And you don't have to wait another two years for a court, instead you can deal with it straight away within the new Injuries Resolution Board."
She explained that it involves mediation between parties in a non-adversarial setting.
"What this allows is both parties to come to the table," Ms Carroll said.
"It's a non adversarial process, so it's not the two people in the same room.
"What we have is an experienced, impartial mediator in the middle of that, and they go between the parties to try and come to a resolution and find out what the actual issues are.
"That can then lead to a much quicker resolution, but one that people can own and they're generally happier with it rather than somebody else making a decision for them."
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In relation to the fall in claims arising from workplace accidents, she said some of that would be due to the pandemic.
"There's a 38% decrease in overall claim volumes," Ms Carroll said.
"I think what's really interesting is we're now in 2023 and claims aren't rising at the level that they were before. So, last year in totality, we had 18,000 claims compared to 30,000 claims back in 2019.
"And since the new personal injury guidelines were introduced in 2021 and they kind of recalibrated awards in Ireland, particularly for more minor injuries, we're seeing a drop in those type of injuries come into us.
"So very, very minor injuries aren't really making their way into the system any longer. So, there's been a change of culture around awards."
Ms Carroll added that there was a "striking statistic" in the board's research in relation to the number of young people involved in workplace accidents.
"There is kind of a doubling of the number of claims from that particular cohort," she said.
"We suspect it's probably to do with the type of industries that those people were going into, maybe through the pandemic and now on the other side of that, that some of that has stuck.
"But I suppose today is all about bringing the data out so that actually employers themselves can start looking at it and then looking at prevention of accidents altogether. So rather than the claim arising at all, what can we do to stop some of these accidents occurring."
