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The final thing for physiotherapists to remember is to monitor progress of their patients and take action if they are not recovering. This is most likely to occur when patients are at moderate or high risk of non-recovery. Such patients can have complex presentations and may require different treatment, often outside the scope of the guidelines.
It’s recommended that you refer these patients to a clinician with expertise in whiplash management who can provide advice to the primary carer. This referral process is often not followed, either due to difficulty in accessing clinical experts or concern about losing patients. However, clinicians with this level of expertise are often physiotherapists who have undergone specific training or clinical specialisation, or they provide independent peer reviews.
To date, focus group feedback has supported this care pathway for people at high risk of non-recovery, which is great news for the profile of physiotherapists within complex whiplash management.
Physiotherapists and their patients are encouraged to take part in the Whiplash ImPaCT trial that will test whether this clinical pathway of care helps in whiplash recovery. This will be the first trial to investigate a clinical pathway that utilises the spectrum of physiotherapy care, from primary through to specialist care.
All physiotherapists are urged to utilise the key resources to help implement these guidelines but, more importantly, to assist their patients’ recovery.
Physiotherapists who are interested in participating in the Whiplash ImPaCT clinical trial should contact Griffith University or the University of Sydney.
Whiplash resources
Resources for patients include:
- Online videos of neck–specific exercises, available at sira.nsw.gov.au and mywhiplash.com.au
- Customised exercise sheets, available at physiotherapyexercises.com
- Get moving whiplash video
- Whiplash fact sheet
Resources for physiotherapists include: