Sexual violence services – the real story

A blog post by Jan Logie

What has really led to the Government’s changing stance on funding for sexual violence services?
People have been congratulating me on this news yesterday and I have to admit working with the sector through this process has given meaning to my time in Parliament and I am proud of the work we have done on this.  I am a bit embarrassed by the congratulations in the context of the thousands of submissions and years and years of work by incredible advocates which really got the result.
While I’ll need to see the dollars in the budget, and hear that the Government is working closely with the specialist providers, especially Nga Kaitiaki Mauri, to design the new model before I relax, I do want to reflect on the journey to this point.
The 70s and 80s saw women coming together to voluntarily support women who had experienced sexual violence. The Government provided some funding from the mid 80s. There was a period of new general services, the Pacific Island Women’s Project, and kaupapa Maori services being set up to respond to the growing need. These groups were advocating for the prevention of sexual violence – law reform and social change as well as supporting victim/survivors. It wasn’t until the mid 90s that we had the first ethnic women’s organisation, Shakti and in the late 90s the Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust set up. There are still obvious gaps.
ACC alongside MSD were the major funders for sexual violence support services. The services were always under-valued and certainly not recognised for the amazing life-saving and at times world leading responses to sexual violence that they were and are. Sexual violence has been one of those very difficult topics to talk about in any context so that always made the services a bit of an easy target for funding cuts.
Despite Maori women being more likely to experience sexual violence in New Zealand and kaupapa Maori approaches being far more successful we have lost almost all of our specialist kaupapa Maori sexual violence services. There was a time when there were over twenty services but now there are fewer than five.
The Taskforce for Action was initiated by Labour in the wake of public horror about Louise Nicholas’s experiences. Louise did not have access to the right help, from our justice system or social services, when she needed it and that is one of the reasons she has been so actively advocating for increased funding for years.
The Taskforce for Action came out in 2009 calling for a national prevention plan and proper resourcing of the sexual violence sectors, basically all the same things that the select committee has recommended again 6 years later.
Maori and non-Maori specialists gave hundreds of hours of their time, voluntarily, in the Taskforce for Action on Sexual Violence. They spent hours and hours strategizing and organising and lobbying to try and ensure that victim/survivors had access to the services they needed. If this had been implemented there would have been no need for the select committee inquiry.
But even while the National party Minister for Justice called the Taskforce for Action the best road map the country had ever had for addressing sexual violence, the Government was in the process of gutting ACC support for victim/survivors. The Government told ACC that they had to make savings. In 2009 they saved $3.2billion dollars by going after, amongst other things, the “low hanging fruit” of sensitive claims. These changes resulted in a 36% decline the number of claims being lodged and even more shockingly the number of accepted claims going from 60% to 3.6% in just two years. Specialist agencies stopped using ACC because they thought it was unsafe for survivors and the number of ACC counsellors halved. During the inquiry into sexual violence funding we heard from a man whose partner had killed herself because she couldn’t get the support she needed over this time.
Many therapists and counsellors and volunteers just kept going, under increasing strain themselves, because they knew that people were depending on them. This was a truly awful time in New Zealand’s history.
Public concern over these changes forced Minister Nick Smith to initiate a review in 2010.The Disley report in 2010 made fourteen recommendations to fix the mess. Considerable effort has been made since then by ACC, the community and others to try and restore ACC. In the select committee report much has been made of the improvements to ACC. A new model is in place and it is much better but we are still not there yet.
Ahead of the budget and future work, I just want to celebrate the bloody minded tenacity of survivors and advocates who have kept going through this very dismal time. I genuinely and wholeheartedly hope the Government doesn’t let us all down again.

© 1996-2015 The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

https://blog.greens.org.nz/2016/04/01/sexual-violence-services-the-real-story/

Changes to ACC funding for sensitive claims

A post from FrogBlog by Jan Logie

Isaac Davidson from the Herald ran another great story today on the support services for victims of sexual abuse and ACC plans to improve coverage.
The new model will be “an expanded, more flexible service which took into account the sensitivity, length of time and cost of treating rape-related trauma based on the 2010 review recommendations.” It will cover full cost of the sessions and will allow people to shop around for a therapist who they feel comfortable with and therapists, psychologist and psychotherapists would be given travel funding to allow them to reach people in isolated regions. ACC is also planning to increasingly include family members or support people through the recovery process. There is an expectation that with increased reporting and more funding ACC were expecting the cost of sensitive claims to double from $45million per year.
Of course this is all good news but there are a few points in here that we need to watch carefully if we are to ensure that everyone gets the right help...

Read the rest of this post here: http://blog.greens.org.nz/?p=30254

© 2014 The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

Not cute

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

I think that politics and psychotherapy are worlds apart, and largely in the different ways they approach the truth. Psychotherapy is largely the search for the truth along with understanding and validating one persons experience of it.
Politics these days seems to be largely about the manipulation of the truth, to most closely match whatever agenda is being pushed. In some ways I can live with that, it’s what I expect from politicians and a healthy news media can assist us to dive into the debate and decide who and what we want to believe. But it’s much harder to take from a public organization charged with the care and treatment of all New Zealanders.
Both of the recent reports into the ACC by the Auditor General and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner  point to “culture problems” within the ACC.  (See: “Dual investigations shows culture problems at the ACC“). In my view this starts to get us to the heart of the problems that have plagued the Sensitive Claims Unit for a number of years. I believe the culture problem that exists within the ACC’s Senior Management is an ongoing pattern of cynical manipulation of the truth for financial and political gain. And sometimes blatant self-preservation...

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://psychotherapy.org.nz/not-cute/

Problem solved

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

In breaking news today the National Government has responded enthusiastically to the Dr. Barbara Disley authored 18 month monitoring report on the ACC’s Sensitive Claims treatment pathway calling it “a triumph of policy over reason.”
New details revealed by the report show that in 2008, claims accepted and therefore the level of PTSD as a result of sexual abuse and assault was diagnosed by the ACC’s assessors was at a whopping 60%.
However since the National led Government’s change of direction at the ACC the percentage of claims accepted dropped dramatically to 40% in 2009; 13% in 2010; 3.5% in 2011 and thus far in 2012 just 3.6%.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://psychotherapy.org.nz/problem-solved/

Back to work

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

Freud was famously quoted (or possibly mis-quoted, translating from German to English can be a bit tricky) as saying his definition of good mental health, or “normal neurosis” was to “Live, love and work.”
It seems John Key’s definition is much simpler: Work.
Both our Prime Minister and the current Minister for the ACC have both revealed their lack of understanding of the world of disability and welfare by their answers to recent questions about the performance based targets at the ACC:

“She [Ms. Collins] said measures that helped ACC encourage people back into work where appropriate were “a good thing”. NZ Herald, June 22, 2012.

This was further reinforced with yesterday’s announcement that WINZ will have a target of reducing the number of long term beneficiaries by 30%.  No word on where the jobs, training or rehabilitation to facilitate this will come from.   Just a number. 30%, gone, by 2017.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://psychotherapy.org.nz/back-to-work/

Low hanging fruit

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

Sensitive claims sent to branch offices – ACC
Hundreds of sensitive ACC claims – those related to rape and other sexual abuse – have been transferred out of the corporation’s Sensitive Claims Unit to case managers in regional branch offices, the corporation has said.
Claimant advocacy groups are shocked by the move they say was made without consultation and in some cases without fully informing claimants.
NZ Herald, Thursday May 31, 2012

This story appeared in the Herald last week detailing the rumour suggested in my last blog.  The breach of the ACC’s own protocols about how sensitive claimants privacy are managed is deeply concerning, despite how the ACC might spin it.  But why have some 250 clients files been transferred outside of the Sensitive Claims Unit?

Well, it’s a bit of story.  But worth the telling...

Click here to read the rest of this post.

When a secret is no longer a secret…

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

Recently I had an ACC claim. I strained some knee ligaments. Old injury, no problem, specialist appointment courtesy of the ACC, and after some appropriate exercise and a follow up appointment, all fixed.
If the file of that treatment got stolen, sent to someone in an email or otherwise treated carelessly, I would be angry. However I can guarantee I wouldn’t feel so ashamed I would want to die, frightened for my personal safety, or worried about being stigmatized by people who found out.
So it is a worrying start to the privacy investigation when the Assistant Privacy Commissioner has issued a letter reported on here saying things like this ...

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http://psychotherapy.org.nz/when-a-secret-is-no-longer-a-secret/

ACC Sensitive Claims Provider and Client Survey: Results

A post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

For those of you who were kind enough to participate in the survey posted here in a previous blog, I thought you might be interested in seeing the results.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Insuring our future

A post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

I hate insurance.  Always have.  Seems like the biggest rort in the history of the Universe.  I give you money, and you give some of it back to me if some pre-agreed bad thing happens.  And if I do claim, you charge me more.
It is a necessary evil, but it bugs me.  I think it started when an insurance salesman said to me “But you have to think about what happens, if you lose EVERYTHING!”  All I could think to say was, “No I don’t.”  It seems wise to generally not think about that.
ACC is not insurance.  It’s a public compensation scheme.  Big difference, and one of the other main reasons why people get so upset when they don’t receive their entitled payouts...

Click here to read more.

http://psychotherapy.org.nz/insuring-our-future/

Lest we forget the ACC claimants

A post from g.blog

There is a parallel story to the ACC scandal that has already cost Nick Smith his Ministerial career, and may well cost other Ministers or senior public servants theirs.  It is a story that no-one apart from Kevin Hague appears to be telling.
That is the story of how ACC claimants are being treated (or mistreated) by ACC.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://greenvoices.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/lest-we-forget-the-acc-claimants/

Blow your own whistle

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

There has been a flurry of commentators and even the Minister for the ACC Judith Collins lining up to blame Bronwyn Pullar for her her actions, and suggest that she has not behaved responsibly.
Whistleblowers usually have to go through hell and back. We even have laws in this country to protect them. And don’t doubt for one moment that power will play dirty to protect power. It didn’t take the spin machine of ACC and the National Government long to start suggesting that Ms. Pullar had behaved badly. This despite the fact that hers was far from an isolated case, she claims (and we have no reason to doubt her) that she showed the full document to no-one, and removed and/ or covered all names before handing over to the media.
Sounds pretty responsible to me...

Click here to read the rest of this post.)

Nick Smith – a Greek tragedy of his own making

A blog post from Pundit by Tim Watkin

Nick Smith got it right, then wrong, then right again. But is this the second or third act in the Greek tragedy that is his political career?
The loss of Nick Smith from National's top ranks has the whiff of Greek tragedy. Or perhaps a Disney cartoon. You can almost see the little angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. Several times Smith does the right thing and refuses to get involved in a friend's ACC case. But then he relents – the devil gets in his ear – and it's all over.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Where there's smoke...

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

When all this ACC carry on about Sensitive Claims kicked off in 2009, and I started this blog, I had no idea that three years later I’d still be banging on about the problems and difficulties claimants and professionals encounter.
I’ve become one of those people who have become embattled with ACC, albeit for a much different reason and with none of the the consequences experienced by many claimants.
Stories that have begun to break about Bronwyn Pullar that suggest she has been fighting for ten years. There are also many, many others who don’t have such powerful friends.
And this reaction to the ACC has been of interest to me as a psychotherapist, and I believe in many ways unique to the ACC. So what is it about ACC that means that people fight and keep fighting with them?

Click here to read the rest of this post.

ACC: what we really need to ask

A blog post from frogblog by Kevin Hague

There’s nothing quite like a ministerial resignation to send political insiders and journalists into a frenzy. There are big issues arising from Nick Smith’s interference in Bronwyn Pullar’s ACC claim. Such as:
• Are the four letters that Nick Smith wrote concerning Ms Pullar’s claim the extent of his interference in her claim, or is there more?
• Did he interfere in other claims also?
• What effect did Nick Smith’s interference have on ACC? As everyone has pointed out, an ACC case manager seeing a letter from the Minister on the file is highly unlikely to be unaffected, and perhaps his involvement explains why two senior managers fronted up for a meeting with Ms Pullar.

New Zealanders are entitled to have confidence that there will not be political interference in ACC claims. We cannot have that without a full and independent investigation of these and other matters. On Tuesday, I wrote to the Office of the Auditor-General asking her to initiate such an investigation. I’d also be happy if some other form of independent inquiry (retired Judge, Commission etc) were used, so long as it occurs.
But let’s remember that Nick Smith’s political interference was uncovered because of arguably the greatest breach of privacy in New Zealand history, with confidential information relating to almost 7,000 people being leaked. These confidentiality issues also raise extraordinarily important questions, such as:
• What was the purpose of this spreadsheet that had these 9,000 records on it?
• Given ACC’s history of inadvertently sending confidential information to the wrong people, why had ACC not developed robust data management procedures, such as data encryption or dis-aggregating names from other information?
• How did the information get sent to Ms Pullar?
• Isn’t that a really amazing coincidence that random chance saw this highly confidential and potentially damaging information being sent to Ms Pullar specifically?
• Why was the privacy breach, which occurred in August 2011, not detected until Ms Pullar told ACC about it in December 2011?
• Is it actually credible that the two senior managers who met with Ms Pullar in December then did not mention the privacy breach to more senior figures? (as a former senior public servant myself, I can tell you that this does not ring true at all: their strong instinct, and correct procedure, would be to report this risk up the chain of command. I would be very surprised if the CEO and Chair were not informed.)
• Why was no action taken to repair and manage the privacy breach once Ms Pullar did not return the information she had been sent? (according to ACC’s account that is.)
• If ACC senior managers (the same ones who apparently did not report it to their superiors)  felt the organisation was being blackmailed in December, why did they wait until now to raise this with Police?
• Why was information about Sensitive Claimants routinely distributed to ACC managers who are not part of the Sensitive Claims Unit?
• Why were the staff, who called those whose privacy had been breached, often described by these claimants as not understanding the impact of the news, insensitive, and unresponsive, in an organisation for which privacy ought to be an absolutely central consideration?

So, some issues for the Privacy Commissioner to look at as well. I wrote to her last Wednesday asking her to investigate and I’m pleased she is going to do so. However, the scope of her inquiry will be limited to privacy issues. The Privacy Act will not empower her to investigate non-privacy matters like political interference, a fact which is apparently lost on the Prime Minister.
And there is another set of issues again. The reason Bronwyn Pullar and her support person Michelle Boag were meeting ACC in December was to discuss a list of more than 40 breaches by ACC of the law, its own rules and good process. The existence of such a list will hardly be a surprise to many ACC claimants. There are still many good people working in the ACC system, and the organisation itself is fundamentally sound, but it is changing for the worse and good people are being squeezed out. A culture of public service is being replaced by what I call a culture of disentitlement: claimants are seen as the enemy, and the the prime directive has become minimising expenditure rather than meeting needs. For well over a year I have been calling for an independent review of the reinterpretation ACC has conducted of its Act, which has seen large numbers of people denied cover because of assertions of “degeneration” or “pre-existing condition” and rapidly increasing numbers of ACC decisions being overturned by review or in the Courts.
Sounds like we need three inquiries.

© 2012 The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

http://blog.greens.org.nz/2012/03/22/acc-what-we-really-need-to-ask/

Is there a doctor in the house?

A blog post from Off The Couch by Kyle MacDonald

Today’s announcement that ACC has managed to send information about 9000 clients, including allegedly 250 Sensitive Claims clients, has been described as “the biggest privacy breach in New Zealand’s history.” (Dominion Post, 13/03/12)
So is this a “simple” administrative error, as is being claimed by ACC? Probably, but only due to a system that is haphazard enough to allow it.
Do they seem to have any understanding of the impact upon Sensitive Claimants of this breach of trust?  It doesn’t seem so.
And does this seem like yet another symptom of a sick organizational culture, one that denies the rights of New Zealanders and shrugs its shoulders when it’s asked to explain?

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://psychotherapy.org.nz/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house/

The (new) face of ACC

A blog post from Bulldust Over a Kiwi BBQ by Gunner Thane

With the changing of the guard in National (Nick Smith relinquishes ACC to Judith Collins) and the re-election of Carmel Sepuloni in Waitakere, are we to expect a change of fortunes for the under fire ACC?
To put things in perspective about ACC, I know personally four people that have dealings with ACC, three in the Sensitive Claims Unit (SCU). Now two of that three also have major issues with ACC and the way they do business. One was sued this year by Dr Peter Jansen, and now another has had problems with ACC faxing out her personal file to three (at least) agencies that have no dealings with this person, i.e. a breach of trust and security.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

http://rednaz1958.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/new-face-of-acc.html

Progress report – through the looking glass

A blog post from Off the Couch by Kyle MacDonald

When I wrote the last “Off the Couch” I was optimistic. We had just received a very supportive and clear Independent review and it seemed unthinkable that ACC could do anything but simply follow the recommendations, and implement it’s suggestions.
I’m not stupid, but I now realise I have been very naive.
So what has changed? Nothing, really. Sorry to report, but other than the sixteen sessions, which was implemented prior to the review being released, nothing substantial has changed. The Sensitive Claims Unit now seems to be easier to deal with, people have been able to access sixteen sessions of “support”, we have some new forms, but when it comes to the issue of diagnosis, and the inappropriate interpretation and implementation of the legislation, nothing has changed. And to receive treatment beyond the sixteen sessions? Back to the “new pathway” I’m afraid.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

ACC digs a deeper hole

A post from frogblog by Kevin Hague

Financial Review of ACC today, so I subbed in for Gareth on the Transport and Industrial Relations Select Committee. Usual thing – we and Labour make the running and when things get too hot the Government members take a turn with patsy questions.
ACC fronted with Chair, John Judge, by videoconference and CEO Jan White fronting most questions, assisted by Denise Cosgrove, who seems to mostly front the reduction in ACC coverage we have seen.
I started by drawing attention to ACC’s claim that they have had to make the “hard decision” to “stick more closely to the legislation” on who gets covered. Were they, I asked, meaning that previously, when more New Zealanders had cover, they got that illegally?

Read the rest of this post here.

http://blog.greens.org.nz/2011/02/10/acc-digs-a-deeper-hole/

Making like Arnie when it comes to ACC

A blog post from LudditeJourno

Making like Arnie when it comes to ACC
Which just means coming back, in a nod to the usefulness of sci-fi in everyday life.  It doesn’t mean I’ve become a right-wing bodybuilder in the months since I’ve blogged last.
I’m going to start by posting a summary I wrote a while back, somewhere else, about the ACC Clinical Pathway review.  Partly because I wrote a lot about this earlier, and partly because I’ve had several conversations with people who protested against the ACC Pathway when it was introduced who haven’t kept up with what happened next.  Mostly because the media have shut down on it, failing to report very much at all about what the Review of the Pathway showed.

Click here to read more.

Good news about ACC?

A blog entry from SOSA

Since the report of the Independent Review of the ACC processes came out in September we have not heard much about how the recommendations are going to be implemented. As always, in the vacuum created by lack of information, the brain does what it does best: It fills in the gaps. You could also say, it makes things up. So it is not surprising, that a few conspiracy theories are floating around the country. People are wondering whether ACC is going to take any of the recommendations to heart. Is ACC trying to wear down opponents of the infamous New Clinical Pathway by buying time?
We have kept our ears to the ground and people have told us the following ...

Click here to read more.