We will be closed from 12pm Wednesday December 24th 2025 to give our team a well-deserved break. We will re-open on Monday 5th January 2026. For any urgent matters please contact ACC directly. Meri Kirihimete and a Happy New Year from the Way Finders team.
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 things are more complex, we’ll walk alongside you for as long as our support is helpful and appropriate to your needs.
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.
We are excited to provide a website that:
If you experience difficulty accessing any part of our site or need support in a different format, please get in touch. We’re here to help.If you have any feedback about how we can make our services even more accessible, please let us know using our suggestions form. We are committed to making our website and services accessible to everyone.
It is our desire to deliver exceptional, personalised service to every person, every time. If you feel we have fallen short of your expectations, we want to hear from you. You can give us feedback about your experience. You can also make a complaint.
You won’t be disadvantaged for raising a concern; we receive all feedback, positive and negative, as opportunities to learn and improve our service. 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, or you can email us or you can speak to one of our team by phone. You can do this anonymously as well if you prefer. It may limit how much we can investigate your concerns, but we’ll do our best to respond. You can use the same form to leave us suggestions or feedback too – think of it as a virtual ‘Make a suggestion’ box!
If you need assistance to give feedback or make a complaint, please let us know so we can provide support or perhaps alternative formats. We’ll treat your concerns confidentially, fairly, and respectfully. We will keep you informed as we work through the process. We want to work with you to resolve your concerns so if you’re not satisfied with our response, please let us know.
