You have come to the right place.
We are not an advocacy service and do not do all the work on your behalf. However, at times we can contact ACC on your behalf to facilitate the next steps or get the pathway cleared, for you to take back control of your situation.
Think of your ACC journey as climbing a mountain. We can give you the right tools, guidance, and equipment. We can come alongside you for the journey and show you the right direction, but we cannot climb the mountain for you.
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There are no hidden fees or costs to engaging with us.
We are totally independent from ACC, therefore our advice is impartial.
We commit to talking in plain language and explaining the ACC jargon.
There is no limit to how many times you can contact us, and you are welcome to get back in touch as more queries arise.
If you email us, or you don’t get to speak to us straight away when you call, we aim to get back to you within two working days.
Once we have made initial contact with you, you may prefer to have a virtual meeting via Zoom or Teams, and we can set this up.
You are welcome to have a support person, or third party attend these virtual meetings to help recall what was discussed as we do not routinely record these ourselves.
Your contact and query may be able to be resolved within one call to us, especially if it is a simple matter of confirming an ACC process or getting started on your ACC journey. If it is complex, we will stay with you throughout your journey.
To help you with your ACC-related query, we may request:
If your contact or query is related to a decision that ACC has issued that you do not understand, or do not agree with, we may ask to see the letter that ACC has sent you with the decision – this is called the ‘ACC decision letter’.
In almost every instance when ACC ‘says no’ (issues a decline letter), we will also request that you obtain from ACC, and share with us, a copy of the document that ACC used to form the basis of their decision. This document is called ‘the internal guidance document’. We use this document to help us understand ACC’s line of thinking and it guides us to provide the best response to you. It is important that we use the correct names of the forms and documents that ACC uses, so that we get the right information to help you. Read more about this document here.
We may need to gather this information through multiple calls and contacts. We can provide a summary email outlining our discussion and recommended next steps.
Additionally, we can:
Prior to any conversation we will ask for ‘Authority to Act’ on your behalf, which involves filling in a simple form and sending it back to us. Your navigator will explain the very easy process to you. Once we have completed your support, we will ask ACC to remove the Authority to Act form.
We can, in exceptional circumstances be your support at special meetings, often known as such things as ‘formal review hearings’ and ‘conciliated meetings’ in the ACC world.
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Your privacy matters to us. We take your privacy and handling any information you give us with the utmost of care and respect. We have a strong privacy policy and we have strong systems and processes in place that we review regularly to endeavour to ensure privacy breaches remain at zero. You can read our Privacy Statement here. In a nutshell, we treat any information you give in the strictest of confidence and ensure our practices and processes are fully compliant with the principles of the Privacy Act 2020. If you feel we have breached your privacy in any way, we take this matter extremely seriously and urge you to fill in a complaints form so that we can thoroughly investigate what has happened.
Our services are primarily offered virtually. What matters to you matters to us in regard to how your needs are met. We aim to provide accessible services by identifying and breaking down barriers to ensure access is as simple as it can be. We can arrange interpreters for you, or deliver our services through a different means which suits you better (such as a virtual video meeting via Zoom for example). Please let us know what your needs are and we will see what we can do to accommodate these.
If you have any feedback about how we can make our services even more accessible, please let us know using our suggestions form.
It is our desire to deliver exceptional, personalised service to every person, every time. We understand trying to find your way around a big organisation like ACC can be hard, and that is why we exist. Although we can’t guarantee that you will get the result from ACC that you were hoping for every time, as sometimes that just isn’t possible, we do hope that our team can help you understand things better and feel more able to move forward with the knowledge you now have.
If you feel that we have missed the mark and let you down in any way with our service to you, we strongly urge you to talk to us so that we can aim to improve our services to you.
You can do this by simply speaking with any navigator, or, you may wish to lodge a formal complaint.
To do this, please use this form and tell us what has happened. We will investigate this thoroughly in line with our complaints procedure, and keep you informed during the whole process.
You can use the same form to leave us suggestions or feedback too – think of it as a virtual ‘Make a suggestion’ box!
