New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

Simmonds, F., & Stevermuer, T. (2007). The AROC Annual Report: the state of rehabilitation in Australia 2005. Australian Health Review, 31(1), S31-S53.

The Australasian Rehabilitation Outcomes Centre (AROC) was established by the Australasian Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine with the support of its industry partners in July 2002.  AROC runs as a not-for-profit self-funding organisation and aims to develop systems for national benchmarking of rehabilitation services.  While the data from AROC currently comes from Australian services (with 85% of all public and private rehabilitation units in Australia signing up to the programme by the end of 2005), AROC has recently been recruiting members from New Zealand facilities.

This paper – the first of its kind – presents summary data from the total cohort of patients discharged from participating rehabilitation units in 2005.  The data covers demographics (such as age, gender, ethnicity and employment status), the funding source for rehabilitation, clinical information (such as length of stay, categorisation of pathologies and comorbidities), and outcome data (such as admission and discharge Functional Independence Measure (FIM) scores and discharge destination).

In some way, the results from the 2005 cohort are a little unsurprising – older people in rehabilitation tended to be women, the public sector tended to treat more of the people with severe impairments, people who had the most impairments on admission made greater FIM score gains and had longer lengths of stay etc.  However, what is excited about this paper is that it represents the beginning of a new way to collect and share information about rehabilitation services and outcomes in New Zealand and Australia.  This data will be of course of interest to researcher and service planners alike.  The support for AROC in Australia is impressive – it will be interesting to see whether a similar level of support is consider important to give from here services here in New Zealand.