New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

ACC has recently announced that it has launched a National Serious Injury Service that will specialise in working with people who have a permanent disability as a result of an injury.  The intention is that this service will take over the management of ACC claimants with serious injuries who have previously been the responsibility of branch case managers. ACC has stated that ‘The new service is adopting a social disability model that is consistent with the objectives of the New Zealand Disability Strategy.  This model recognises that treatment and rehabilitation to restore capacity and function are critically important in the period just after a person has been seriously injured (and may be need in concentrated bursts later on to enable people to achieve their goals).   However, once a person’s condition starts to stabilise the need for continuing rehabilitation is overtaken by the need to adjust to living life with a serious injury - doing the things that most able-bodied people take for granted.’

Personally, I am all in favour of the development of a specialist service for people with serious injury.  Having worked in private community-based rehabilitation for people with traumatic brain injury in the late 90’s (when ACC last had a specialist serious injury service) I certainly know the value of engaging with ACC employees who have time to consider the issues facing people with complex disabilities.  However, at risk of being called a pedant, I wonder why ACC has created this distinction between ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘adjusting to life with serious injury’.  What is this new process of ‘adjustment’ if not rehabilitation?  I have a sense that ACC is pigeon-holing rehabilitation as an activity that involves just star-jumps and kitchen assessments.  If the process of ‘adjusting to life with serious injury’ involves assessment of a person in their current context, identification of personally-meaningful goals for improvement of health status or quality of life, implementation of strategies to achieve those goals and evaluation of the outcome of those strategies – then I call it ‘rehabilitation’. Maybe this is just semantic quibbling – but it bugs me that people feel the need to create new terminology when the concept of ‘rehabilitation’ is misconstrued as a biomedical reductionist activity.

Despite my nitpicking, I wish this new service all the best, and hope that the needs of people with serious injury and those of their family and supporters are greatly improved as a result.  (Make a comment below or email me if you would like to talk about your personal experience of this new service!)

ACC informs us that ‘the new Serious Injury Service is being progressively rolled out across the country and will be fully operational on a national basis by March 2008. The service is already operating in the Northland and Auckland region and the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Hawkes Bay region will be operating by 3 December.’