The Action Plan closes the planning stage and opens the treatment that follows. ACC approves the next block of hours on the strength of it.
Referral · PSY50 · ACC266 · PSY60 · Decision point · ACC267 · PSY60 again · ACC268
At the end of the planning hours you send ACC an Action Plan on form ACC266. It is three pages, and most of it is straightforward.
The form should be completed in collaboration with the kiritaki. That is not a formality. The plan belongs to your client: the goals are theirs, and they are the one who will carry them out between sessions. A plan written with them, as opposed to a plan written about them, is one they own.
Most of this comes straight off the referral, including the claim number.
The last row is the one that needs a moment’s thought. For most clients it is straightforward. If it isn’t, tick no and tell us — we’ll raise it with the Recovery Partner before anything goes further.
This is short and factual. What has ACC accepted?
The second row asks whether the client has other active ACC claims. Ask your client — most people know whether they have another claim open. If they’re not sure, tell us and we’ll check.
This section is where you introduce the person. The form asks for their living situation, work or study, health, relationships, how they spend their day, and their strengths and protective factors.
Note that last part. ACC is asking what this person has going for them, not only what is wrong. Strengths and protective factors is where the client’s support network belongs — who is around them, and what those people actually do.
The form splits this in two, and the split is the most important thing on the page.
Everything in the first box is what you are asking ACC to fund treatment for.
The second box is everything else going on in the person’s life. It matters, and it belongs on the form — just keep in mind that these issues are not for this treatment to solve.
The form asks for specific examples of when the difficulties occur and how they affect functioning. General descriptions of mood or anxiety are much less useful here than a sentence about what the person does or doesn’t do.
If there had been something — a bereavement, a financial strain, a longstanding difficulty — it belongs in the second box. Putting it there doesn’t weaken your request. It shows ACC you have seen the whole picture and are clear about which part you are proposing to treat.
Answer it for every client. Ana’s is a low-risk case, and the answer is still specific rather than a bare “no.”
Four more fields sit around the ones above, and they are usually short.
Two are worth a note. Field 3e asks whether other agencies are involved — this is a coordination question, so that ACC and you both know who else is working with this person. And if the client has had mental health support before, the form asks when and where, which is useful to you as well as to ACC.
This is the centre of the form and the part worth spending time on.
Take this from the reason and outcome fields on the ACC265. It anchors everything below it to what ACC actually asked for.
The form sets out four requirements, and they are worth reading closely because they describe exactly what a usable goal looks like.
Read together, these rule out the kind of goal that is clinically meaningful but impossible to review. Improve confidence and process the emotional impact of the fall fails all four. It isn’t behaviourally measurable, there is no before and after, and there is no point at which anyone could say whether it happened.
This is a real constraint, and it is worth naming.
Plenty of good therapy involves a period of exploring with someone without committing in advance to what will be measurable at the end of it. Working with ACC, you don’t have that latitude: the goals have to be behavioural, countable, and reviewable within the block.
That constrains the goals, not the therapy. What you do in the room to reach them is yours. The second series we are about to publish, on the clinical side, takes up the harder craft question — how to write measurable goals for work that in private practice you would frame quite differently.
Three columns, five numbered rows. These are the criteria above, satisfied.
The three columns are related. If a goal can’t be measured, it usually needs rewriting rather than a cleverer measure. And if the intervention column just names a modality, it isn’t yet saying anything — CBT describes an approach; graded exposure to walking outdoors, beginning with the letterbox describes what you are going to do.
Four goals rather than five. There is no requirement to fill every row, and four specific goals are better than five where the last one is padding.
Notice what the goals have in common. Each names something Ana will do, each has a current figure and a target figure, and each of them came from Ana rather than from her psychologist.
This is where the route gets chosen, and it is worth being clear about what you are and aren’t deciding.
The second box records a fact rather than a recommendation. Tick it when ACC has already accepted the mental injury and the referral is for post-cover treatment — you will see it on the Purchase Order as PSY61 or PSY62 rather than PSY60.
Between the other two, you are not deciding whether this person has a mental injury. You have had around two hours of contact. That question is what an assessment exists to answer, and it needs psychometric work you haven’t done.
This is the decision the first unit was preparing you for. If the psychological difficulty is a barrier standing between your client and a recovery still in progress, this is treatment — Ana’s situation. If the four planning hours show you something else, that there is no recovery left for it to obstruct, that there was no physical injury in the first place, or that the harm came from a medical procedure, then the question is one of cover, and that is what an assessment exists to answer. Unit 1, Working Under the PSB Contract sets out the four routes.
A useful second question: could ten hours of treatment go ahead sensibly whatever the answer about cover turns out to be? If yes, treat. You will know considerably more at the end of it than you do now.
And some referrals answer the question before you do. A work-related traumatic event with no physical injury has no physical recovery for anything to be a barrier to, and assessment is the route from the start.
One thing worth knowing. Recommending an assessment doesn’t mean you are volunteering to do it. ACC is asking for your professional opinion on the right next step, not for an offer of service. If you are approved for treatment only, you can still recommend assessment; the recommendation goes to ACC with your Action Plan, and ACC finds a provider who can carry it out. The planning stage doesn’t always end with you carrying on into the next block.
Her ankle is still healing. Her fear of falling is real and has narrowed her life considerably, but it is a response to an injury she is still recovering from and it is the thing standing between her and that recovery. It is not a difficulty that would exist if the fall hadn’t happened.
Treatment without approved mental injury cover, the third box. Ten hours.
That is the answer for most clients you will see. The harder version of this question — has this become something in its own right? — usually arrives at the end of a treatment block rather than at the end of the planning stage.
Be realistic about frequency. Weekly is the usual assumption, and the completion date should follow from it. ACC’s timeframes are generous, so allow more than just the weekly option — for some clients fortnightly works better, and that is something you and your client decide together.
If you need either, this is where you ask, with the number of hours and how they would support recovery. Both are covered in their own unit.
This is an estimate, not a commitment. Work it from weekly sessions — ten sessions is about two and a half months — and add a fortnight, which puts the date roughly three months out. If a Progress Report is what comes next rather than a Completion Report, aim to have it with ACC about two weeks before the tenth session, so there is no gap in sessions while ACC considers it.
If applicable. Leave blank unless you are recommending assessment. If you are, talk to us first — we’ll arrange the assessor.
Two tick boxes, then two dates: the last appointment that informed the report, and the day you sign it.
The kiritaki doesn’t sign the Action Plan and doesn’t need to see the written report before it goes to ACC. The collaboration the form asks for happens in the sessions, when you agree the goals together.
The Action Plan goes to ACC only. This is different from the Progress and Completion Reports you’ll write later, which go to the client’s GP as well.
Read it once as though you were the person at ACC who has never met Ana, and check you can answer four things.
If all four are clear, the plan does its job.
ACC reviews the plan and either approves the next service, usually within about a week, or sends it back asking for more information.
A returned plan isn’t unusual and isn’t a problem — but it does need addressing promptly, and the time spent reworking it isn’t separately funded. It’s worth getting right first time.
Approvals come to PractiSpace. We’ll update our system and let you know when the hours are in place so you can carry on with your client.
The ACC266 asks you to make your clinical reasoning visible to someone who will never meet your client.
That is a translation task, not a different kind of thinking. The plan is still the one you and your client built together. What the form adds is the requirement to say what will change, by how much, and how you’ll know — which is worth doing anyway, and which gives you something real to compare against when you reach the end of the block.