Services

Your rehabilitation is individually tailored to suit your specific needs

Your rehabilitation is individually tailored to suit your specific needs and quality of life goals whether you are a high-performance athlete, weekend warrior, recreational exerciser, busy mother or father, stressed worker, growing teenager or older member of the community. We utilise an expansive array of techniques to reduce your pain and optimise your function and quality of life as follows:

Numerous objective measures are used to determine the intensity, type and behaviour of pain, symptoms and limitations. These include observation of your posture, manual muscle testing, joint integrity tests, joint and soft tissue palpation and range of movement analysis. Another important component of the assessment is to observe movement patterns for functional activities to ensure they are safe and the right muscles are engaged. Depending on the nature of the injury and demands placed on the body during the day we will also assess your walking and running gait, strength, power, speed, endurance, agility, balance and proprioception. Management and rehabilitation can then be tailored from the outcome of this assessment.

Having personal experience with the changes your body goes through to bring life into the world, Diana is passionate about helping others return to the things they love.
If you experience leakage with coughing/sneezing/exercise, painful intercourse, or other symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction a pelvic assessment may be right for you.
Birth injuries from the 1st October 2022 may be partially funded by ACC

A synovial joint is where two bones meet and allow movement. These joints are surrounded by a capsule that produces and encloses the fluid inside the joint. The capsule is connective tissue and contains many nerve endings. Thus, the joint capsule can be a source of pain and limitation of movement. Joint mobilisation can be active (i.e. when you produce the movement) or passive (i.e. when someone else moves a joint without your assistance).

In the clinical setting, joint mobilisation refers to the passive movement of joint at various speeds and amplitude, graded from 1 to 5, to help restore optimal movement, function and/or reduce pain. A manipulation is the grade 5 joint mobilisation that involves a quick thrust to the end range of movement of the joint. Sometimes a click can be heard.

This is not the sound of bones grinding against each other but rather gas bubbles leaking out of the joint capsule during the procedure. Your physiotherapist will discuss what type of joint mobilisation may be of most benefit for you.

In physiotherapy terms, soft tissue refers to muscles, tendons, ligaments and other connective tissue that help support the body and allow movement. Massage of these structures can help reduce pain, increase range of movement, improve movement patterns, decrease swelling and relieve tissue tension. A range of different massage techniques are utilised that work with and across the fibres of the tissues. Trigger point release is another technique used to help reduce muscle spasms and the pain they generate. Your physiotherapist will discuss what technique will be best suited for you.

The philosophy of western medical acupuncture is based on the neurophysiological response of the body to a stimulus. It can be used to assist pain, swelling, inflammation and range of movement for a wide range of acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions. Dry needling is a subset of western medical acupuncture. It is more intensive with needles inserted into trigger points to release muscle tension and restore optimal muscle activity.

Exercise rehabilitation is imperative to resolving a huge majority the injuries. The goal is to restore mobility, strength, balance, proprioception, endurance and power to pre-injury, or often, better than pre-injury levels and to prevent re-injury. There are 3 stages in the rehabilitation process and exercises are prescribed according to these stages. Stage 1 involves careful gentle exercise to allow damaged tissue to heal without aggravation. Exercises are progressively loaded in stage 2 to strengthen muscles, tendons and ligaments so that they can withstand the demands placed on them in every day life. In stage 3, functional and sport specific exercise begins to allow tissue to adapt in readiness for return to work or sport. Each clients’ exercise rehabilitation is tailored to fit their lifestyle. For some people, it may be all home-based, for others it may be in a gym setting.

The ECP team includes: Physiotherapists, Surgeons, Sports Doctors and Occupational Therapists. This multidisciplinary team is responsible for assessing and developing an individualized patient-centered plan. The ECP team supports patients with a package of services that best meets their needs, whether surgical or non-surgical. If accepted onto the pathway, services are fully subsidized by ACC and as such there is no direct cost to the patient!

We are excited to offer the ECP pathway for complex shoulder/back/knee and ankle injuries including Achilles ruptures, Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), meniscal injuries, shoulder dislocations, Patella Dislocations plus many more to those accepted onto the programme. Talk with your physiotherapist to see if ECP is right for you.

In today’s world, we spend large portions of the day seated and sedentary. The human body was not designed for this! As a result, suboptimal postures develop that, over time, can cause or contribute to pain and injury. We educate all clients on how to maintain the natural curves of the spine in sitting, standing and during functional activities. We will also teach clients how to transfer weight correctly through the feet and knees to prevent over-loading structures and injury. It’s never to late to make changes that will enhance quality of life now and in the future!

Strapping can be used to help unload and protect an acutely injured area so that pain can settle. Strapping can facilitate normal movement and postural patterning and provide proprioception and improved joint stability to minimise injury risk and enhance confidence (e.g. strap an ankle when playing netball).

Throughout the rehabilitation process, clients’ will learn about their injury, prognosis and what is required to ensure an optimal recovery and return to full function. We also teach them how the body was designed to move and how to prevent pain and injuries. We want you to walk away in a better condition than before you were injured!  Knowledge is power and quality education allows our clients to take ownership of their rehabilitation. In this regard, “doing your homework” is essential to a successful outcome at work, sport and life! Homework tasks will likely include exercise rehabilitation and adjustment to postures and daily activities.

Some injuries are severe enough to limit work capacity. In this situation, ACC provides a funded return to work programme. Various allied health providers are involved in this process on a needs basis. Our physiotherapists design a 6-week gym programme to improve injury specific stability and strength as well as general conditioning for work readiness.

  • Post-operative rehabilitation (e.g. ACL and shoulder reconstruction, total hip and knee joint replacement)
  • Acute and chronic low back and neck pain
  • Nerve injuries
  • Muscle strains
  • Ligament sprains
  • Healing fractures
  • Overuse/over-loading injuries
  • Tendinopathies (e.g. achilles pain, tennis elbow, jumper’s knee)
  • Posture issues
  • Conditions associated with growing (e.g. Osgood Schlatters and Sever’s)
  • Arthritis
  • Headaches

If your symptoms are not progressing in the manner that we expect, we will liaise with the numerous allied health professionals we have well established networks with. This includes sports medicine and musculoskeletal specialists/doctors, orthopaedic surgeons, podiatrists, hand therapists, dieticians, radiologists, and gym trainers/coaches.