DVA Diagnosis Form (D9287) — Download and How to Complete It

What the D9287 is

The D9287 Diagnosis Form is a two-page DVA form on which a medical practitioner records a diagnosis for the purposes of a claim. DVA’s own instruction is blunt: “For many injuries and diseases, DVA requires diagnosis by a specialist including test or imaging reports. Please print this form and take it to a General Practitioner to complete.”

It exists because of a rule that catches a great many veterans out. DVA cannot accept liability for a condition that has not been diagnosed and named. Symptoms are not a condition. “Sore back for twenty years” is not claimable; lumbar spondylosis is. The Diagnosis Form is the mechanism for getting that name onto the file in a form a delegate can act on.

Who fills it in

A medical practitioner — in practice, your GP. Not you, and not your advocate.

You can download and print it, and you should, because handing it to your GP saves explaining what is needed. But every substantive field is the doctor’s: the diagnosis, the basis for it, the dates, the provider number and the signature.

What is on the form

Reading down the current version, it asks for:

• Patient details — surname, given names, date of birth.
• The medical diagnosis. The condition, named.
• The basis for the diagnosis — how the doctor arrived at it. Examination findings, imaging, pathology, specialist correspondence.
• A declaration about specialist reports — a tick box confirming the practitioner has sighted any specialist or test and imaging reports DVA requires in order to make the diagnosis.
• Other related diagnosed conditions that should be considered alongside the one diagnosed.
• Approximate date of onset of the injury or disease, based on the available notes.
• When the claimant first presented for that injury or disease.
• Practice details — address, telephone, and the practitioner’s stamp including provider number.
• The practitioner’s signature and date.

Two of those fields do more work than the rest, and they are covered next.

The specialist reports declaration

The tick box confirming specialist or imaging reports have been sighted is not a formality. For a large number of conditions DVA will not accept a GP’s diagnosis on its own — it wants the specialist report or the scan behind it.

Which conditions those are depends on the Statement of Principles for the condition and on DVA’s diagnostic requirements. Some conditions have a defined diagnostic threshold written into the SoP; others do not. If your GP ticks that box without the reports actually existing, the claim comes back.

Two date fields, two different questions. “Date of onset” and “when did the claimant first present” are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously. Onset is when the condition was first present — not when it was first scanned, and not when someone first wrote it down. Getting onset wrong can defeat a SoP factor that is in fact satisfied. Why the imaging date is the wrong date.

Where it goes wrong

• A symptom in the diagnosis field. “Back pain”, “knee pain”, “anxiety” — these are not diagnoses and will not carry a claim.
• Onset recorded as the date of the scan. The single most common technical error, and it pushes the gap between service and onset out, sometimes fatally.
• The reports box ticked with no reports. Comes back, and costs months.
• One form for a claim with eight conditions. Each diagnosed condition needs its own diagnosis recorded. Most veterans have many more claimable conditions documented than they realise.
• No provider number or stamp. Bounced on administration alone.

What the form does not do

This is the part worth understanding before you rely on it.

The D9287 names the diagnosis. It does not connect that diagnosis to your service. It has no field for the Statement of Principles, no field for which factor is met, and no space for the service history and clinical timeline that a delegate needs in order to accept liability.

So the form is necessary and not sufficient. It gets a diagnosis onto the file. Whether DVA accepts the condition turns on a different question — whether the evidence shows a SoP factor is satisfied — and that argument has to be made somewhere.

That is what a Diagnostic Assessment is: the diagnosis, the ICD-10 code, the ADF and occupational history, the referenced clinical timeline, and each SoP factor argued to MET or NOT MET. You can read real ones — de-identified examples across hundreds of conditions — in the Claims Library.

If you are not sure which conditions you should be getting diagnosed in the first place, that is what a chart review answers: every page of your record read, and every claimable condition identified, before anyone fills in a form.

Common questions

Talk to us

Call 0429 146 039 or email reception@vhc.org.au — Veterans Health Centre, Ipswich, Queensland. We are a veteran-focused general practice and DVA paperwork is ordinary work here.

Related pages

The D0904 referral voucher · How to submit a DVA claim · Uploading documents to MyService · SoP library · Claims Library · Appealing a DVA decision · DVA glossary

General information for Australian veterans, current as at 17 September 2026; not medical advice. The D9287 is published by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs — always download the current version from dva.gov.au, or call 1800 VETERAN (1800 838 372).