Submission to The Joint Standing Committee on NDIS Planning.
NDIS/NDIA Planning Prosses
As you know the NDIA doesn’t share the draft of their decision with the participant, their nominees and/or their support coordinators, they also don’t ask for more evidence for them to be satisfied and fund the right amount before finalizing the participant’s plan. Instead the NDIA approves what they think is the right amount and then asks the participants or their nominees to put a review, which it takes a long time to process and still not enough for the participants basic needs. I personally have put three reviews and she had five plans for the last 3 years. The results were disappointing and for the last review, nearly three months on still am waiting for a date to be set. I believe the part of NDIS money, that is spent on the reviews could be better used to fund direct support of the participants.
The followings are quite cost-effective approach for the NDIS and very beneficial and important for the participants:
· Specialised planners for none-verbal, autistic, mentally delayed with challenging behaviours and multiple disabilities. (very complex needs). My daughter’s NDIS Support Coordinator requested that be considered for the complex-pathways team and the Planner did not know what she was talking about and did not explore this option and as a result – was underfunded for community access which puts her in significant danger and at risk of isolation of not receiving the correct level of funding to access the community.
· Having representative of the above disabilities within the NDIA/NDIS board.
· Plan drafts should be discussed, and if needed more evidence, collected.
· Evidence should be based on the person disabilities and specialists reports rather than incident reports and police reports with this group of people.
· When the participant’s plan finalised based on their needs and with the right amount of funding, their plan should run smoothly without cutting their funds for long enough that the participants don’t lose their services in the middle of their treatments.
In my daughter’s case beside the report from behaviour clinician, Occupational therapist and Speech pathologist, she didn’t receive fund to access meaningful activities in the community, she didn’t receive the 2:1 funding for community access. As a result, she got confined at home, bored with no routine and meaningful social engagements, so she displayed more self-injurious behaviours
and property damage. She did create unhealthy and dangerous activities for herself to engage in, which redirecting her is not easy neither cheap - not to mention long lasting psychological damage and physical injuries to herself and people around her.
If my daughter gets appropriate funding and being looked after properly, then there should be a reduction in incident reporting, but based on the current incident reports and police reports funding criteria, when her fund gets reduced, then she will go back where was the starting point and this will cost more to the NDIS. My daughter’s disability cannot be cured or be any less reliant on high intensity supports in one year for her fund to get reduced or cut off. The condition to base the funding on the incident reports and police reports will put the participants’ life in danger, at least my daughter’s and like her disabled people. I am sure that she is not the only one.
Her psychologist (behaviour clinician), OT and speech therapy fund cut off, before her Behaviour Support Plan be finalised, the OT and speech pathologist begin their work. When the funding back reinstated some of the therapists’ timetable were full and my daughter needed to be put back in waiting list or go for new therapists, who they should spent the same amount of time to know her and her needs like the first clinicians did, time to read the previous clinician reports. In fact, according to the current system the NDIA pay double the amount with less support to the participants and makes the participants suffer more.
With regards,