Welcome to the PractiSpace provider network.
These learning units are here to help you work confidently within ACC’s Psychological Services contract, usually called PSB. They are not clinical training. You already know how to assess and treat. What they cover is the part that is specific to working within an ACC-funded service: who it is for, what ACC is asking of you, and how your clinical work is communicated back to ACC.
PSB is a different contract from ACC’s sensitive claims service, the ISSC. The two have separate referrals, forms and requirements. If you work under both, keep in mind that everything in these units applies to your PSB clients.
PractiSpace holds the PSB contract as the Supplier. You deliver the services as an approved provider under that contract. In practice, we handle the contractual and administrative side with ACC, and you do the clinical work.
Let’s start with who the service is for.
Everyone referred to you under this contract has been injured, and ACC has accepted their injury. It might be a sports injury, a fall at home, an assault, a car accident, or surgery that went wrong.
Here are four people you could find yourself working with under PSB.
Fractured her ankle falling down the back steps. The bone is healing on schedule, but she has become frightened of walking on uneven ground. She has stopped going out on her own and has started asking her daughter to do the shopping. She is also quite low about how much she has given up in three months. She says she feels like she has become an old woman overnight.
Caught his hand in a machine at work. The hand has recovered reasonably well — he has lost some grip strength, but he can use it. What has not recovered is everything else. He sees the moment it happened, over and over. He wakes from nightmares. He has not been back onto the workshop floor and cannot say when he will be.
Was working behind the counter when a man came in with a weapon. She was not hurt. But she has not slept properly since, cannot be in the shop without watching the door, and has started calling in sick.
Went in for routine surgery and woke during it. He could hear the theatre staff and could not move or speak. Physically he is fine. He is not sleeping, he cancelled a follow-up appointment he needs, and he says he cannot let anyone near him with a needle.
All four are referred through this contract. But they are not in the same situation.
Ana’s difficulty grew up around her injury. The fear, the withdrawal, the low mood — none of it is a separate problem. It is the shape her recovery has taken, and it is now getting in the way of that recovery.
If nothing changes, she stays at home and gets weaker, and the ankle becomes the least of it.
Psychological treatment here has a clear job: remove what is standing between Ana and her recovery. Most of the people referred to you look like Ana.
Something different has happened to Tomás. His hand healed. The accident left him with a condition of its own — one that would need proper treatment even if his hand had never been injured at all.
His psychological condition is not a barrier to recovering from his hand. The condition has become the injury itself.
Mereana was never physically hurt. There is no fracture, no wound, nothing to heal — and so there is no physical recovery for anything to be a barrier to.
But something happened to her at work — one event, which she was there for — and it injured her.
ACC can accept an injury like this on its own, without any physical injury behind it.
David’s surgery was routine and his body is intact. Nothing about his treatment left a physical injury, so again there is no physical recovery in the picture.
What the treatment left was this.
ACC can accept that too: an injury caused by medical treatment, where the harm is entirely psychological.
For Ana, the psychological difficulty is a barrier. It stands between her and her recovery. Remove it, and she recovers from her ankle.
For Tomás, Mereana and David, there is no barrier — there is an injury. The psychological condition is not in the way of the recovery. It is the thing to recover from.
That difference decides which route a client takes, and it is not about how badly someone is suffering. Ana could be more distressed than David. The question is a different one:
For people like Ana, treatment can begin. For the other three, ACC needs an assessment first.
That difference is also reflected in how providers are approved. PSB covers two kinds of clinical work.
Psychological treatment for clients referred by ACC, working towards their recovery.
Establishing what the psychological condition is and how it connects to the injury, so that ACC can decide whether to accept it.
Providers are approved by ACC for treatment, for assessment, or for both. You will know which applies to you from your own approval, and the referrals we send you will match it.
If you are currently approved for treatment and would like to move towards assessment work as well, there are two parts to it. Talk to your supervisor about readiness and about the supervision you would need. Then talk to us — approval comes from ACC, and the application goes through PractiSpace as the Supplier, so it is something we arrange with you rather than something you arrange alone.
We also hold learning materials on assessment. If that is a direction you are interested in, get in touch and we will go through them with you.
The next unit opens the ACC265 referral form, so you can read what ACC is asking for and see which route your client is on.
After that, two units follow the four people above. One takes Ana’s route: treatment where psychological difficulty is a barrier to recovery. The other takes the route Tomás, Mereana and David are on, where a mental injury claim is being considered and an assessment comes first.
The units after those cover the reports you write along the way, your ACC contact, and the additional services the contract provides when treatment needs them.
All of this is about working within the ACC service rather than about the clinical work itself. A second series looks at that side — the presentations you meet under this contract and how to work with them.
ACC funds psychological treatment as part of a recovery process. That gives the work a structure: there is a planning stage, treatment happens in defined blocks, progress gets reviewed, and the episode eventually completes.
Within that structure, the therapy is still yours. These units are about the structure, so that it takes up as little of your attention as possible and you can get on with the clinical work.
PractiSpace Limited — a contracted supplier to ACC under the Psychological Services (PSB) contract. We manage referrals, purchase orders and ACC correspondence so our providers can focus on clinical work.