Learning Specialist School restricted access due to location of Family

The Canberra Times this week has reported on a child (aged 12) who is not able to access the school services she needs because her family is in the wrong location.

Molly’s parents plans have been dashed after they fell through this week, creating concerns “…she will lag even further behind her peers in a mainstream classroom”. The reason for the decision to deny …  her postcode, not her needs.

“The family live across the border in Murrumbateman but said they had been assured for the past three years they would not have to move to Canberra to guarantee her a place, as Molly’s eligibility had already been ticked off”. Unfortunately the system places an emphasis on supporting children with disabilities to stay in mainstream classes due to its inclusion policy.

However, in Molly’s case this is to her detriment as quieter children like Molly who fall may fall asleep when upset, gets overlooked therefore funding isn’t being delivered specific to her needs. Molly who functions at the level of a six year old, needs to be integrated with children who can relate to her and vice versa. “She needs friends like her who still believe in Santa Claus and play with Peppa Pig figurines”

“In a unit, she’ll still be at school with her siblings, but she’ll be able to learn what she really needs, life skills.”
Specialist schools in the ACT such as Black Mountain School are also full at present. While the ACT is obliged to prioritise the enrolment of local students first, the spokesman did not say if this applied to enrolments of NSW students with disabilities, which are handled on a case-by-case basis.

Executive officer of advocacy group People with Disabilities ACT Robert Altamore said places in learning units should be determined by a child’s need alone.

Lets hope that the Federal Legislation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme will start to address these sorts of issues

12 Months into the Scheme, and Dubbo is reaping the rewards

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was introduced in Dubbo twelve months ago and the region is feeling positive and optimistic about the benefits the community has received

“The NSW economy continues to benefit from the roll out of the NDIS with the workforce expected to grow by 23,650 – 28,950 workers”, said Matthew Wright (the NDIS engagement and inclusion branch manager to the Local News the Daily Liberal.

The statistics quoted for the NDIS are quite staggering. As an example, “..NSW workforce expected to grow by 23,650 – 28,950 workers, and “The NDIS is empowering more than 2264 adults and 603 children locally in the Western NSW region and more than 81,000 people across NSW, including more than 18,000 people receiving supports for the first time”.

As the Queensland roll out continues, the need for a concerted workforce development focus is becoming more prevalent. We have the work available for people, but there just isn’t enough good high quality calibre of people. Unfortunately other areas who have had such increased demand haven’t been able to offer any insights into how to make it work either. So, to ensure the people who need support get what is necessary, a proper national workforce planning model is needed. We can only ‘recycle’ or train a certain amount of people.

For more information click here on how Real Community Services can help.

NDIS Funding & The Affordability of Disability Services

An article recently posted  ‘The Cost Of Mission’ discusses the issue of affordability of providing services against the funding that is on offer from the National Disability Insurance Agency through the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The author, Gabriela Di Perna, principal at Baxter Lawley, writes that “…not-for-profit disability services providers in Australia are being left wondering if they can afford to be true to their mission”, and that sooner or later “…government will have to pay the true cost of service”.

What the disability sector has to grapple with is that this is a national scheme that is as complicated and diverse as the services that it aims to deliver. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) now provides individualised funding for people with a disability, allowing them to exercise more choice and control over whom, how and when they source the items that help them achieve the lifestyle closest to what they wish for, more than they ever have had before.

For far to long, the disability sector has been unregulated and cost of service provision has been funded to what the ‘missions’ state are the needed costs. However this is a new world and cost cutting is needed for efficiency. If we are providing funding to assist people to be supported, then we should have been efficient to start. Services are amalgamating to share resources, capitalise on market penetration and reduce duplication, alongside restructuring of particularly middle and top management positions that were paid comparatively handsomely but not significantly contributing to any real tangible outcomes for clients.

The article details that “The National Performance Benchmark Project led by Professor David Gilchrist and Penny Knight has been monitoring and reporting on change within the disability sector in Australia since 2015. The study records the financial performance of 150 organisations across Australia and shows that profit margins are low or non-existent for about half of all organisations. Profit is critical to sustainability and for organisations to change to meet NDIS requirements”.

What is not explained is that the profitability of these organisations was like this way before the NDIS came into play. I can recount story after story where services were spending up big at the end of each Financial Year to ensure all the money was used otherwise they wont get it back. New desks, new vehicles, telephone and information technology equipment etc. Rarely would we hear anyone saying ‘lets put it back into the service provision’, because as it was already allocated to Operational Expenses in the budget. Now Operational Expenses are finite, we hear complaints particularly amongst the Not For Profit Services whom get significant concessional contributions and tax relief as compared to ‘For Profit’ who despite getting the same dollar per hour of delivery for a client, can make it work and still pay taxes to the Office of State Revenue for no-sense taxes (SPT etc etc)

The question should not be “why should mission-centric service providers be forced to absorb the gap between their target price and the achievable price under the NDIS, and in doing so, risk the sustainability of their organisations?”, it should be why should mission-centric service providers continue to be allowed to trade if they can not sustain how they manage their services when others can?

The people and organisations in the disability sector were provided training and education on how to understand what a unit cost is through the National Disability Services Costing and Pricing Education Series across Australia and Online (mind you at tax payers cost). If these people were running companies managing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, how on earth did they, boards included, not understand what their cost per unit was and how to reduce it so that the consumer was getting best dollars for the tax money spent…? Like really? Perhaps we start there to understand why they are unable to get costs down to a manageable and affordable rate?

Trevor Green / Company Director

Real Community Services

Quality and Safeguarding under NDIS

Providers are obligated to take all reasonable steps to facilitate the development of a Behaviour Support Plan when it becomes apparent that a participant they are working with has complex behaviour support needs or that a restrictive practice may be necessary to prevent harm.

The newly released National Disability Insurance Scheme (Restrictive Practice and Behaviour Support) Rules 2018 detail how the Quality and Safeguarding Commission will regulate and monitor the use of restrictive practices. These rules set conditions that apply to registered NDIS providers who use regulated restrictive practices or work with participants who have complex behaviour support needs.

The rules are based on the Quality and Safeguarding Framework and the National Framework for Reducing and Eliminating the Use of Restrictive Practices in the Disability Service Sector (the Restrictive Practices Framework).

The new rules will commence in July 2018 with transitional arrangements for each State and Territory until full rollout. Their aim is to ensure that restrictive practices are only used in circumstance where complex behaviours place the participant or others at risk of harm. What these risks are and of course what is acceptable is dependent on each services risk matrix procedures but we would assume that there is a general consensus of what is or what is not acceptable risk in any organisation

It details that  regulated restrictive practices must only be used in accordance with a participant’s Behaviour Support Plan (BSP). This plan will need to be developed by a registered specialist behaviour support provider. These providers must be Registered and Certified by the Quality and Safeguarding Commission. They are also the only people that can review a BSP.

Where there is no BSP in place, the NDIS provider must take reasonable steps to facilitate the development of an interim BSP. This must be done within 1 month of a restrictive practice being used or proposed. A comprehensive BSP will be required within 6 months.

Providers will need to provide monthly reports to the Commissioner on their use of restrictive practices. If they have only been granted short-term approval to use restrictive practices, then they must report every 2 weeks. How these reports will be generated is yet to be determined.

The positive from this is that finally we can see some direction for providers in who and how Positive Behaviour Support Plans and associated Restrictive Practices is now to be overseen

Trevor Green / Company Director

Real Community Services

The NDIS and What Will It Mean?

The disability sector used to be described as underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient.

As the NDIS now rolls out across Australia, why are we still hearing the same phrases? Any system that supports people in my opinion will never be seen as fair by everyone. People have different expectations, different needs and different ways of scoring outcomes for them and their family.

The NDIS is really only a funding stream. How we deliver services, if what the sector was sprouting for many years as choice and control for people with a disability, shouldn’t have to change. But, now “true choice and control” is here, will we be seeing in many years to come that true choice and control is really just a catchphrase when you rely on others to help?

Emma Griffiths in this Focus series on the ABC, explores the NDIS and what it really means

You can listen more by clicking on the link below

ABC Focus on NDIS

Trevor Green

NDIA Providers De-Registration

Frustrated Providers are considering de-registration amid continuing issues

Hours of un-billable times are being spent by small businesses to get answers from the NDIA, often each service getting different answers, with the added difficulty of getting through on the 1800 numbers.

Trying to plan ahead and work out where they want to take the business based on information on what is difficult to get and taking a long time to get answers, is leading many to consider de-registering from the scheme.

Pulling out of the NDIS in my view isn’t the answer. Unless you want to only provide services to people who are only plan managed and the small amount of people not eligible for the NDIS, you wont have a business to talk of in years to come. If you want to remain in the NDIS space, look at trimming the unnecessary frills that you may have been accustomed to in previous years and focus on providing an excellent service.

Yes, you will have an audit to pay for to ensure you are providing safeguards to people with a disability, however that is the cost you have to build into the type of business you have selected.

Yes, you will be frustrated with the often different bits of information gleamed from each call.

Yes, the NDIA is here to stay. It is a system that was emotionally and politically pushed ahead of proper planning. Everybody is to blame not just the NDIA. The government and the public wanted it here and now without proper due through to all the pitfalls and unfortunately issues happening in trial sites weren’t learnt from and lessons passed onto to others.

However, we all have a roll to play in providing progressive and targeted feedback on the solutions….. there is where we now need to focus on

You can find the radio interview on this link: Click Here

 

 

 

Autism Advocacy Groups Concerns for NDIA Funding

Community Concerns that NDIA is shrinking the eligibility into the scheme

The eligibility requirements are being tightened after a blowout in the amount of families seeking support for clients with Autism and the ballooning number of clients and difficulties placed onto the scheme. Unfortunately it seems the NDIA has underestimated their numbers from the scheme. As the amount of people with Autism grows, the system must also grow with it.

Although changes have not been made yet, it seems to be a case of ‘watch this space’

You can listen to the full article from ABC Interview here: NDIA Autism Funding Cuts

NDIA and Accomodation Choices

Community Concerns that NDIA may force people into shared accommodation

Disability Groups have let it be known that they have concerns that people who receive funding under the National Disability Insurance Scheme will be forced to live with others, against their preference, apparently entirely due to funding constraints.

The article states that “… only a very small number…of a very small percentage” of NDIS participants would be funded to live alone in SDA…”, and “…it is important for providers to note that an SDA budget to support a single resident dwelling is only likely to be provided to a very small number of SDA eligible participants (a small percentage of NDIS participants overall), even when the dwelling is in a configuration that makes shared supports possible,” the brief said.

Real Community Services shares this concern. The disability sector has been screaming out for true choice and control for years. For many years people with a disability did not even have a choice of provider so had to tough it out often with a service they didn’t want. Now the NDIA is rolling out very quickly, yet the premise that a person can’t now choose to live where or with who they want is not even close.

You can read the full article here for more information.