Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS – Planning
It is important that plans be sent as drafts to participants and their families or those assisting them with the planning process, to allow them to check that the plan is what the participant needs and wants, and to ensure that changes are made if necessary.
In our experience, as parents of a 29 year old woman with severe autism, we have never been sent a draft plan for our daughter. Instead, some time after a plan review meeting, a finalised plan suddenly appears in the “Participant Portal”, and we receive a printed plan in the mail a week or two later.
As our daughter has been a participant since the start of the Scheme, and her case is complex, she has had numerous plans. In most if not all cases, plans sent to us have needed to be reviewed, as either they have not reflected correctly what had been agreed our daughter needed, or there have been other mistakes – some absolutely horrendous. We believe this is a common experience.
After this, the plans usually have to go through a drawn-out review process. This causes delays to participants getting the supports they need. When a revised plan is finally approved, it also frequently causes serious problems for service providers, who find that the previous plans belonging to their participants have all of a sudden been cut off, so that they cannot claim for services which they have provided. Attempts to recover these lost payments are met with inaction, and long delays. Only government departments can get away with such outrageous incompetence which causes financial loss to providers, without any concern for what they are doing. Indeed, the NDIA claims in their quarterly report to be a wonderful world leading scheme, however we, and we suspect many other participants, families and service providers, have yet to receive this wonderful service, and don’t believe the NDIA are qualified to rate their service. We understand that in many cases providers have written off the lost payments, as it is too time-consuming and difficult to obtain a satisfactory outcome. (We know this at first hand as well as by report, as we are providers of Specialised Disability Accommodation to our daughter, and
each time she has been given a new plan, we have been unable to claim for the last period of SDA which we provided to her).
It follows that the current process, where a draft plan is not sent to participants or their nominees, doesn’t help anybody. It wastes the time and energy of vulnerable participants and families; causes serious problems for providers; and wastes NDIA time as well.
To conclude:
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Plans must be sent to participants and their nominees as drafts before they are finalised.
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Plan reviews must be undertaken in a timely manner. There should be a time limit of, say, one month.
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When a plan has been reviewed (either a scheduled review or otherwise), the revised plan should be introduced in such a way that it does not cause disruption either to the participant or to service providers. It should not have to be a brand new plan, about which the participant has to notify providers, and which leaves providers out of pocket because they can’t claim for services provided under the previous plan. If in the short term brand new plans have to be created, the NDIA must ensure that it notifies participants, nominees and service providers in advance, so that they are able to prepare themselves – including, in the case of providers, by claiming for services provided under the plan that is about to be terminated.
1 September 2019