What is “Full Recovery” in the Car Accident Context?

This is a tricky question because it depends on who you ask.

At one end, we have the infamous Quebec Task Force (QTF) guidelines, bought, paid for and adopted by ICBC and other insurance companies. The QTF defines “full recovery” as a return to work. Since a full 70% of MVA patients tough it out and miss no work, often for economic reasons, this definition doesn’t work so well for injured folks. It would mean that 70% of people in B.C. who claim an injury aren’t actually injured. It is no wonder that ICBC worships at the altar of the QTF.

Those of us who advocate for injured folk vote for a definition at the other end of the scale. We would say that “full recovery” indicates complete cessation of all MVA related symptoms.

The term “residual symptoms” creeps into the reports of those men and women who make their money toiling as ICBC doctors. They label as residual symptoms any complaints that are present after the point at which we believe soft tissue healing is complete, say 3 months. A patient may have unrelenting, daily neck and back pain two years post MVA but, in the report of the ICBC doctor, the injury healed in 3 months with “residual symptoms”.

Again, those of us who advocate for MVA victims would relegate the insurance propagated term of “residual symptoms” to the garbage heap of meaningless English lexicon. To us, “fully recovered” means exactly what it implies, a return to the pre- MVA state. It is an unfortunate fact that the majority of car accident patients who continue to have some MVA related symptoms one year post- MVA will never be fully recovered. They will not return to their pre-MVA health status.