Inquiry into Implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Provision of Disability Services in New South Wales
Name: Name suppressed Date Received: 14 July 2018
Partially Confidential
My son has complex support needs. He has severe autism, multiple allergies, and Gitelman’s Syndrome, which impact his life to a substantial degree. He is non verbal, suffers from extreme anxiety, requires continual physical activity tin order to alleviate stress and maintain good health. He is completely dependent on 24 hour individual 1:1 and 2:1 support on an informal basis by his aged parents who support him over 130 hours per week and on a formal basis by his local support organisation with a team of 4 support workers who enable him by private transport to access outings in the local community such as bushwalking, going to the zoo, bike riding etc.
The first NDIS planning meeting for our son was held on 30 May this year at NDIS office. We were informed by email and telephone conversation by the LAC that we needed to bring documents to provide proof that our son required the level of support we were requesting. On arrival, we found that the designated LAC was ill and another LAC had been appointed. She commenced the questions but had difficulty uploading the answers to the main server. Two thirds of the way through the process, she could go no further and had to write down our answers which she said she would upload later on when presumably demand for the program was lower. She explained that happened a lot and that we might have to come back and go through the whole process again. To us that would seem to be a failure on behalf of the process with regard to confidentiality and efficiency. At the end, we handed her the documents but she would not accept them asking that they be sent to her electronically.
As there were 27 supporting documents from medical and allied professionals, and we only had access to a home scanner, we explained that as my husband works we would have to spend the weekend scanning then emailing them to her by Monday, 4th June when she would be working. The documents arrived on time but by mid afternoon on 4th June we had not received confirmation of receipt of the documents.
I drove out to the NDIS office to discover that LAC was on a training day and would not be in the office until Wednesday, 6th June. Another LAC in the office, looked at the server to see if any of our documents had been uploaded to the server but they had not. I was not able to email her the documents as she was not the LAC for our son’s planning meeting. We finally received a confirmation email on the evening of 4th June that the documents had been received by LAC for our son and that she would upload them to the main server on Wednesday, 6th June when she next worked at the NDIS office.
We received our son’s NDIS plan, some days later, dated 5th June and sent to us on 6th June. It is clear to us that J plan was approved and sent before the supporting documents were uploaded and so were not read or taken into account before a decision was made with regard to the level of funding our son has been granted in his first plan.
It seems obvious that our son was not treated as an individual and just given a generic low level of funding that does not meet his complex support needs. we question whether his plan was just rushed through to meet some time and cost goal by the end of the financial year.
We now find ourselves in the situation of having to make a complaint to the NDIS and also to have to endure an appeals process. It seems very unfair and inequitable that our son and consequently our family has been treated without due process. We have complied with all the directives of the NDIS but the whole process has been very unprofessionally managed by the NDIS.