Inquiry into the provision and regulation of supported accommodation in Queensland
Submission No: 159
Submitted by: (submitted by Queenslanders with Disability Network) Publication:
Attachments: Submitter Comments:
This is a transcript of an audio submission received by the Community Support and Services Committee. It is not a strictly verbatim record, but rather an accurate record generated by the committee secretariat. The committee has determined not to publish parts of the transcript from the submission including: identifying information of the submitter and/or their residence; material not relevant to the inquiry; and words that may be considered offensive.
Audio file
Transcript
Hello, my name is . I currently reside at in
. My contact phone number is and I am happy for this information to go public.
So I’m here to talk about what we need, and that we’re not getting, so I look at people who live here, that go along with NDIS, they go along with Auscare. They go out places, they do things, they do them on a regular basis as well and I feel left out and I’m sure that most other people here that are not on the NDIS or not with Auscare, I’m sure that they feel left out as well because they don’t have a way of getting out and being part of the world. So that’s a really big thing for me. I’m so remote here that I can’t get to the hospital for appointments or just Ipswich in general for anything. I mean coming back to , I can say lots of good things about the staff. I can stay, say a lot of good things about the facilities and the food, oh gosh, the food is lovely.
However I don’t get to go out and do these things. I have a condition called bilateral peripheral neuropathy and bilateral peripheral neuropathy is nerve pain of two limbs that is it’s not real, so I get pain signals that are not pain, so they cause me pain but like I said, I’m not. I’m not really in pain, but it’s a major struggle for me to go to the shop. It’s major struggle for me to get out of bed some days. I’m in so much pain. My main thing is that I don’t get to go out and be part of the world. I know I’m part of the world, I wouldn’t ask for the world unless it was for my son. I’m not asking for the world. All I’m asking is to be heard. What I’m asking for is for a social worker or any kind of worker to come out and take Me Out to do stuff regularly, like, like the endos workers do with the crowd in here, like the Auscare workers do. So some people in here have places to go four days a week and I don’t even get to go anywhere one day a week unless I get paid, and then I have to walk myself down to the local Woolworths and walk back. That is a mission that, an absolute mission because of my legs and the pain. I came here from the Princess Alexandra Hospital and they treated me so very well and here at they have treated me so very well.
However, there is a class of people here where we are divided. There are those who go out and those who do not go out, and those of us who do not go out get jealous. Those of us who do not go out get stuck twiddling our thumbs. The entertainment here that I use, so my laptop for example. I get sick of. I get sick of it because I get have to play it for so long just to keep myself occupied. It shouldn’t have to be that way. We should have help and the only help that I can think of is to have someone to take me places every fortnight or every week to have them resourced so that they have funds to buy their client food, lunch and just a minimum amount of funds. Most NDIS customers, and Auscare customers they’ll have their money allocated and by rights I should be on the NDIS, but I’m not going to go into that, but I have to go places with my own money.