NDIS participants fear proposed changes will give them less choice and control
It’s not easy to find disability support workers in regional areas, let alone those with whom one can develop a strong level of trust, but over the past seven years Jarrod Sandell-Hay has managed it.
A participant of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), Sandell-Hay lives with his wife and their two dogs on the New South Wales Central Coast. The couple are both wheelchair users.
Sandell-Hay receives about six hours a day of personal care under his NDIS plan. This involves a support worker coming into the family home and assisting him in the inescapably intimate environment of his bedroom and bathroom. As a consequence, it’s very important to Sandell-Hay that he can choose who those workers are.
“We’ve had the same workers for years and years now. They’re all very highly professional, highly trained workers. They know us and the people they support,” he says. “Where I am, it is very hard to find support workers that I can get when I need them, and that are value for money.”
Many of them aren’t NDIS registered. But under proposed new legislation, his support workers would be required to register and to undergo audits, risk assessments, and compliance monitoring and more in order to receive payment with NDIS funds. This makes it highly likely they wouldn’t register at all – which would put them out of reach for Sandell-Hay.
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