From: To: Community Affairs, Committee (SEN); Subject: sub898Submission to the Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Bill 2012 Date: Thursday, 17 January 2013 12:55:53 PM
Please consider this email a formal submission by me to the Senate Standing
Committee on Community Affairs Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance
Scheme Bill 2012.
The current disability system has many problems that need to be addressed.
working as a paediatric physiotherapist in regional South Australia, I am all too familiar with the extreme difficulty we have in accessing mobility and access equipment for our children with major needs. All too often despite the best forward planning many of our children have to start kindergarten in a pusher because the wheelchair which has been on request for 12 to 18 months is not available! How demoralizing and what a poor first image! The difficulty of transporting equipment from kindy to home or school to home, particularly when there are other children in the family can also be quite prohibitive. The plight of these families is poorly understood. How good it will be when they can have some say in the timely purchase of services and equipment to maximise the access and acceptance of their children. we all know the importance in early development of the ability to make choices and the consequence of our decisions, but how can these children learn this if they must rely on someone to move them if they have time.
The main features of the NDIS that will make a difference to the community are:
Ensure support and equipment is available when needed, More opportunities to participate in the community, Less red tape, with planning done locally by people who know their community
The most important services for the NDIS to provide are:
Therapy and allied health services, Equipment and home/vehicle modifications, Flexible in-home/outside home respite
I support the introduction of the NDIS.
I have worked in this region in this sector for 40 years, so I have gone through the endless fight to get access to equipment and services in an appropriate manner with very many families. I have seen the strain this places on relationships and the difficulties it causes for siblings and other family members to have a severely disabled child who must wait for one to two years for vital pieces of equipment and the unnecessary demandas made on families for repeated visits to the nearest capital city (over 450kms away) for measurement or trial of equipment when it is clear what the child needs. I have seen children who travel in their wheelchairs in vehicles, or rely on seating in their chairs for safe feeding, needing to go to Adelaide for repairs and alterations which may take 2-3 days and who are not loaned another suitable chair to enable them to be safely transported or fed while they are awaiting the return of their own chair. Very often these repaisr and alterations could be carried out locally, but the funding does not cover that.
I agree for my submission to be made public