New Zealand Family Physician 32(6) December 2005 : 389-393

Not held by NZFVC. Interloan through your local library.

This article discusses a study that compared the treatment rates provided to ACC sexual abuse claimants by practitioners in different professional categories. The practitioners were psychiatrists, psychologists, and counsellors. Data were obtained from ACC on the total number of claims per provider and the total number of claimant visits to each provider for all providers whom ACC had paid for counselling services for sexual abuse claims during 2003. Visits or claims for each provider were estimated as total number of treatment visits divided by total number of new claimants. Qualitative analysis was conducted to determine differences between professional categories in visits or claims. The results showed that sexual abuse counselling services were provided by 647 professionals to 8676 claimants over 107,685 visits during 2003. Counsellors provided significantly more visits or claims than psychiatrists or registered psychologists. The authors posit that psychiatrists and registered psychologists would be expected to achieve better outcomes and/or similar outcomes with fewer treatment visits per claimant. It could not be determined whether these two types of practitioners were working more effectively than the counsellors because data were not available for the issues that would need to be examined. Discussion is provided on the issues that would need to be considered which include: diagnosis of mental disorder; nature and effectiveness of treatment modalities; and assessment of treatment outcome. Recommendations are made for an additional data set that could be collated and analysed.