FAQ

No, unless you are a patient who has had a work injury or a road accident covered by a third party insurer, you don’t need a referral. Just give us a call or jump online and make an appointment. If you have had a work injury or a road traffic accident, you will need to see your GP, who will give you a referral for physiotherapy.

Over many years of treating thousands of patients, we believe that having a bit of extra time when we first meet you allows a few good things to happen:

1. You have time to tell us your story right from the beginning which generally provides us with crucial information;

2. We are able to carefully and specifically diagnose your movement issues, discuss our diagnosis with you, formulate a treatment plan, and maybe even do some treatment on your first visit.

We believe that having only 30 or 40 mins for your first appointment can be not enough, and we risk missing valuable information either from your story or your body if everything is too rushed.

In saying that, for a simple ankle or wrist injury, with no other body part involvement, our front desk staff will be able to allocate 30 mins for your initial appointment.

We recommend you wear thin loose shorts and, for ladies, to wear a standard bra. If possible, avoid sports bras as we may need to access your thorax and upper body.

If you do not own shorts or have come unprepared for any reason, do not worry as we have a large selection of shorts for you to choose from to wear during the session.

All of them!

Yes – just ensure you have your health fund card with you when you are here for your appointment.

The enhanced primary care referral scheme is a Medicare scheme which provides you with a rebate for your physiotherapy treatment, under certain circumstances. In this scheme, you must have a chronic and complex condition, as determined by your GP. If you qualify, your GP will give you a referral which allows you to be rebated $52.95 (at the time of writing) from your physiotherapy cost. YOU WILL STILL NEED TO PAY THE FULL AMOUNT OF YOUR PHYSIOTHERAPY TREATMENT FIRST.

This rebate is for a maximum of 5 sessions per calendar year.

Then our staff will be able to facilitate a rebate by the government. Sometimes this can be done straight after your payment, and for this you will need to provide an EFTPOS debit card.

If they are less than 5 years old, yes please. If you cannot bring all your scans in, please bring in your report.

Recent government changes to the way private health funds rebate Pilates classes mean that Pilates classes run by a Pilates instructor will no longer be covered by your health fund. However, Pilates exercises that you perform in the presence of your physio, during a physio session are still covered (as a physiotherapy treatment session).

For more detailed information, just follow this link:

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/private-health-insurance-reforms-fact-sheet-removing-coverage-for-some-natural-therapies

This will be determined by your physio once they have assessed you. This will be done in consultation with you and the need for attendance will be explained to you. Rest assured, we will always look to treat you as little as possible and empower you to recover as soon as possible.

No, not necessarily. In fact, we have several of the staff who are keen runners and we think running in an amazing form of exercise. We will look to keep you running, as long as your running loads don’t negatively impact your recovery.

Of course! We are very family friendly here at Active Physiotherapy Newtown and CBD. The only thing we’ll ask if that little climbers are kept off any gym equipment for their own safety!

This will be ultimately decided by your surgeon. They will have guidelines for this, depending on your operation, so please consult with your surgeon.

When you can start exercising is different for everyone and depends on the type of labour and delivery that you experienced. We offer a Week 6 post-natal return to exercise assessment to help guide you through this process. At this assessment, your physio will check your abdominal muscle separation, teach you how to re-engage your core (using our real time ultrasound machine to check your lower abdominal muscle activation), discuss your pelvic floor muscle recovery and assess this as required. Once your physio has determined these, she will prescribe your exercises and guide your return to full function.

No – we insist you bring a parent or guardian with you for your appointments. Given we may need to assess and palpate different parts of your body during standing or movement tasks, we think it’s best for all concerned that your parent/guardian is present.

No – we are unable to offer any customer parking in the building. However, there are ample parking spot in the local area and excellent public transport options right on our door step!

We understand that sometimes things don’t go to plan and that you may have made an appointment that you need to change. All we ask is that you give us 24 hours notice, so we may have time to offer that appointment to someone else in need. It’s best for you to call us on 9519 4913 and let us know you can’t make. Replying to your SMS reminder or email is likely to be missed, so please refrain from using those methods.

If you do not give us ample warning or do not show up, we will need to charge you 50% of the cost of your consult.

Active Physiotherapy Newtown and CBD take your privacy very seriously. We are committed to complying with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988. This privacy policy describes what we do with your information.

Active Physiotherapy Newtown and CBD needs to collect information about you such as your name, date of birth, street address, contact numbers, email, health fund details, medical history. We may also need to collect personal and medical information about you from third parties such as Govt departments like Medicare or Dept of Veterans Affairs) , private health insurers, GP’s, medical specialists and radiology clinics.

The purpose of collecting this information about you is to provide you with the best possible health care, which is time efficient and effective. For eg, obtaining a recent scan result from your radiologist or receiving a referral for your care from a specialist.

We use a secure and encrypted cloud based diary, billing and clinical note taking service called Cliniko and you can find their privacy policy here:

https://www.cliniko.com/policies/privacy/

We will never sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may share de-identified aggregated demographic or clinical information about you, which would only occur in the case of medical research. If you are invited to become part of a research trial run by or through our clinic, you will be informed and appropriate research ethics and methodologies will be undertaken.

We take appropriate security measures to ensure your personal information stay protected. We use secure document destruction organisation for old paper file destruction.

A confidentiality agreement is entered into with all employees in order to protect individuals personal information. We view unauthorised disclosure of your personal information as a serious breach of our privacy policy and any staff member being found to have done or be doing this, will have legal action taken upon them.

If you have any questions or comments about how your personal information is managed, please contact either John Panagopoulos or Martyn Morris at admin@activephysiotherapy.net.au or by calling us on 9519 4913.