Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) is a leading cause of disability both internationally and across Australia, with the propensity for profound long-term impacts on a person's psychosocial functioning, wellbeing, and quality-of-life outcomes. However, the concept of psychosocial need is not universally defined, creating significant ambiguity for practitioners who seek to address these impacts. The policy/practice nexus is where the frontline ambiguity and challenges surrounding psychosocial needs are often created and navigated. This can be due to the lack of clarity in legislation and policy about psychosocial need, the multiplicity of policies that apply to practice, a lack of designated funding programs, among other factors. Consequently, frontline organisations and practitioners who deliver legislation and policy are critical to understanding what psychosocial need is in day-to-day practice. Social workers, who work in community neurorehabilitation (CNR) to improve the psychosocial wellbeing of people living with ABI, are often challenged by the ambiguity of psychosocial need. As such, the organisational context can prove to be an important intermediary to facilitate social work practice with psychosocial need in community neurorehabilitation.

The study of the ambiguity of psychosocial needs in CNR and how organisations and social workers manage this at the policy/practice nexus, is scant. Yet, it is important to understand how organisations approach this issue, and the actions and behaviours of social workers when meeting the psychosocial needs of adults with ABI. This thesis explored how frontline social workers navigate the organisational influences at the policy/practice nexus in the CNR setting when meeting the psychosocial needs of people living with ABI with the Australian context.

The primary focus of this thesis was the perspectives and experiences of frontline social workers responding to psychosocial needs of people living with ABI, and organisation managers who are critical intermediaries of policy/practice. A street-level bureaucracy perspective (SLB) was used to conceptualise the policy/practice ambiguity of psychosocial needs, to investigate how social workers made sense of psychosocial need, and responded in practice, and the influencing nature of organisational settings (Brodkin, 2012; Evan, 2004; Lipsky, 1980). A SLB perspective provided an original perspective for uncovering how psychosocial need is constructed in day-to-day practice. [...]