First, most telecounselling research has examined other physical disabilities (e.g. stroke, multiple sclerosis),4 making it difficult to extrapolate the findings to spinal cord injury. Second, these heterogeneous samples often include individuals with comorbid cognitive problems (e.g. stroke, traumatic brain injury), who require different psychological assessments and interventions.5 Third, trials that have evaluated the application of telecommunication technology within spinal rehabilitation have incorporated diverse treatment programmes, including telemedicine, telenursing and multidisciplinary telerehabilitation, making it difficult to isolate the effectiveness of counselling-only services.6 Finally, there are very few qualitative or quantitative reviews specific to this area.4 Faced with limited available research, we recently attempted to address some of these problems by conducting a meta-analysis of telecounselling research involving people with chronic physical conditions that have a significant disease burden,7 namely spinal cord injury, limb amputation, severe burn injury, stroke and multiple sclerosis.4 While informative, this analysis was limited to telephone-based counselling services only, was not specific to the spinal cord injury population and, moreover, pre-dated a number of recent telecounselling trials that can now be used to narrow the focus of our analysis to this group.