The high injury rate with in the Australian construction industry necessitates proactive action on the behalf of rehabilitation professionals. Safety culture is a concept that is gaining traction within this sector as a useful concept to further reduce fatalities, injuries and incidents. Ten focus groups were completed with Australia's largest constructors to investigate this concept of safety culture and to further evaluate the skills, knowledge and abilities required by people who hold influential and key roles. Data interpretation revealed three important personal characteristics that underlie a positive safety culture: safety knowledge, user/interpersonal skills and appropriate attitudes and beliefs. These findings are applied to the rehabilitation process and it is concluded that rehabilitation professionals need to contribute to the development of a positive safety culture by enhancing the workforce's understanding of injury management.

Safety climate, defined as workers' shared perceptions about the importance of safety to their organisation, has received increasing attention as a construct that is useful for benchmarking organisational safety and as a way of measuring the socio-organisational antecedents of safety performance. Few studies have utilised pre-existing safety climate measures and as a result of this, there is limited information about the generalisability of the construct and its underlying dimensions across organisations and industries. This is an important step towards establishing safety climate as a generic organisational construct which can be reliably measured. In those few cases where studies have used existing measures, results indicate inconsistencies in the underlying factor structures. Accordingly, using a sample of 321 employees from three separate organisations and industries, this study examined the factor structure of a modified version of an existing measure (the Safety Climate Questionnaire [SCQ]). Principal components factor analysis revealed that the original factor structure was upheld by the current sample (with the exception of two factors collapsing into one). This provides support for the generic nature of safety climate as it is operationalised by the SCQ. Additional items were included and emerged as two dimensions, providing support for the generalisability of these new factors across the organisations and industries employed. The results are of theoretical and practical significance as they provide evidence for the generic structure of the construct across organisations and industries, and exemplify how a measure of safety climate could be usefully employed in disability management planning and early intervention strategies.

Successful rehabilitation of whiplash injuries is a concern for patients, practitioners and third party payers. Despite advances in scientific knowledge and developments in the field of medical investigations and imaging techniques over recent years, recovery from whiplash injury following motor vehicle accident remains uncertain and controversial. Ongoing symptomatology has been associated with limitations in returning to work and home functioning, however, relationships between neck disability, perceived difficulty in return to work and ability to cope with functional demands despite the pain, have been not been explored. This study examined the relationships between these factors by identifying what daily functional activities were difficult for whiplash injured workers, and also comparing the individual's ability to function despite the pain (pain self-efficacy), with ongoing neck disability (NDI) and perceived difficulty in the return to work process.

This article draws on the experience of training mental health professionals as part of the New Zealand Casemix Classification and Outcomes Study (NZ-CaOS) and outlines the training conducted in the use of the primary measure, the Health of the Nation Outcomes Scales (HoNOS). It identifies the need to extend training to consider the contexts of culturally diverse populations, and describes assessment and interpretation implications for the introduction of this measure as part of routine clinical practice in Australia and New Zealand. Training in the HoNOS provides an opportunity to support the continued development of culturally responsive assessment in Australasian clinical practice. However, these opportunities will only be realised if there is continued development of how outcome measurement tools such as the HoNOS are interpreted and rated, and continued consideration of the role that cultural context plays in the lives and presentation of mental health consumers.

The recent article by Allison and Stephens, ‘The assessment of pain beliefs and their role in predicting recovery from repetitive strain injury’, addressed an important issue for both rehabilitation counsellor practitioners as well as for rehabilitation researchers — the role of people's beliefs in influencing their behaviours and achievements while living with chronic conditions or recovering from traumatic injuries (Radnitz, 2000). Using chronic pain patients as study participants, the authors assessed pain beliefs and then correlated belief scores with three indices of ‘recovery’ (function improvement, pain decrease and total improvement). While the study as reported had a number of strengths, there were two aspects of the published article which concerned me as an academic who is heavily involved in teaching and conducting research in the area of understanding factors that influence rehabilitation ‘recovery’. One of my concerns has to do with the design of the study, and my other concern pertains to the conclusions drawn by the authors following the analysis of the (minimal) relationships between the study's key pain and functioning constructs. Both of these concerns are elaborated upon in the following paragraphs.

My concern with the design of the study is only important because of the title of the paper and the conclusions that the low obtained correlations seemingly precipitated. The title of Allison and Stephens' paper contains the phrase ‘…predicting recovery …’. Yet the criterion measures used in the study are open to extreme criticism as adequate measures of ‘recovery’. Identifying appropriate criteria in applied research is rarely easy (Ronan & Prien, 1966; Smith, 1976) but ignoring traditional observable measures of rehabilitation progress (such as enhanced self management and increased assumption of normal role responsibilities) means that rehabilitation counsellors reading the article can learn little about the influence of pain beliefs on the reeular behaviours of their clients.

I agree with Murphy that the title of our article is ambitious and we have not covered many aspects of recovery. The losses attributed to repetitive strain injury (RSI) are numerous and variable and are experienced not just by the person in pain but by friends, family, work colleagues and insurance companies to name a few. Measuring recovery from these losses is very complex. In our study we have chosen to focus on only two areas of recovery — decrease in pain and increase in function. In doing so, we have not defined recovery specifically in the title and we have implied, although not explicitly stated, our definition throughout the text. We are glad of the opportunity to clarify this here.

Our definition of recovery depends on context and client. If we work in educating counsellors we may believe that observable behaviours are important indicators of recovery. I work with people in chronic pain and for most of them decrease in pain and increase in function are the most important indicators of recovery. As these changes take place, other changes follow. For example, their mood improves and they can assume normal role responsibilities (or redefined role responsibilities). If, however, they assume normal role responsibilities without increase in function and decrease in pain, the behaviour is often not sustainable long term and more losses are incurred. If we choose to measure recovery from the perspective of the person in pain it seems reasonable to use a questionnaire that measures improvements from that perspective. We cannot assume that the observations of counsellors are more objective, comprehensive, reliable or valid than the person with RSI, particularly in view of the fact that the person with RSI lives with the condition 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The impact of stress on both the psychological and physical wellbeing of the individual has been a primary topic in the psychological literature over the past decade. Alongside the weight of research on the effects of life stressors, the study of traumatic stress and its physical and psychological sequelae has overwhelmingly captivated researchers across the full range of the social science disciplines. Recent events have focused attention on the plight of combat veterans once again. The current review was undertaken in order to provide an overview of the recent extensive research activity on PTSD in war and combat veterans and focuses predominantly on veterans from the Vietnam War. Epidemiological data is presented on the prevalence of traumatic stress and the incidence of PTSD. Evidence for the high rates of co-morbidity between PTSD and other major clinical disorders is reviewed and the contribution of a number of peri-traumatic variables, pre-trauma and post-trauma factors to the development of PTSD is assessed. A review of the cognitive theories of PTSD suggests a number of common elements and theoretical similarities.