Annie in wonderland

This is a really basic question that we see needs to be answered, and we see that it is something that we need to be aware of the people outside the NDIS don’t really understand the jargon that is within the NDIS and I am hoping that this year I can break it down a lot more but, a Support Coordinator is someone who helps you navigate the NDIS so it could be a person who attached to an agency or independent. I find that going independent works for me much better than someone being with an agency and this is due to the fact that I have had bad support coordinators they were doing dual roles, so I found that this isn’t a great idea but for others, it might work really well. So a support coordinator is someone who helps you navigate appointments, sets up service agreements and helps you to be able to work towards your goals and if you need a change of circumstances or are coming up to a plan review we see that this is where the really get to shine in that they specialize in building go...

  So this is something that we need to discuss it is a term we often hear thrown around and it means very different things to different people, but in terms of the NDIS, it has a very specific meaning.   This is the term complex needs as a person with a disability can have either just their disabilities or chronic illnesses or have just one or the other as well.   Complex needs in terms of the NDIS: “ NDIS Participants are identified for the Complex Support Needs Pathway by the complexity of their situation and personal factors such as being homeless or returning to the community from living in residential aged care. Involuntary or voluntary involvement with particular government systems such as Justice or mental health would also be factors which would necessitate entry to the complex support needs pathway.” This is something, we need to be very aware of in that   support workers are undertrained in being able to work, with people with complex needs and we see...

This is a really important topic to talk about and we need to be aware of it as internet safety is something that we don’t talk about in the context of disability because people with disabilities often use the internet to connect with others and to be able to work remotely.    However, we are seeing that if you are isolated you are more likely to be scammed as a scammer would make you feel good and accepted, but their  end goal is to be able to make a connection and to make you feel safe but they are going to scam you. It is something that I feel we need to talk about it as it is something that people need to be aware of to talk openly about it because people are often ashamed to come forward and talk about it due to the complexity of the internet and the fact that our older generations don’t understand internet langue or etiquette that varies between sights as well and we see that this is something that we need to be aware of that various sights will target a diffe...

Disability and emotions and I see that this is going to be a challenging conversation that we need to have to be able to get to the bottom of things as the system as we know it has become to complicated with power going to the providers and not the clients commonly called the participants and this is a major issue that needs to be addressed due to the fact that many clients including myself have been emotionally harmed by rules and regulations that are put into place because of an incident that relates to something else and we see that this is a massive issue and we see that this ties into the systemic undertraining of support workers, we see that this can really harm some people due to the way that the rules aren’t really person-centered that they based around the medical model of disability and we see that this isn’t ok really and we see that people need to be aware of this as I have recently left a care organization due to, several factors.     Lack of consistent care ...

This is something that we need to talk about, and I see that we need to be aware of it, that support workers are human and need good backup support from their agency. I saw a couple of incidents that we need to be reminded of that there are some great agencies out there and that we need to remember that the support workers do have, lives outside of work, many clients, and having to be able to work with a large group of people can be massive. We also see that this is something that Large multi-office organizations seem to forget they are focused on the numbers, and we don’t want to see that we want to see person-centered care from a lot of people, and we see that this is something that people need and want and what is person-centered care? It is something that we need to be aware of it is where the person is put at the front of their care and people need to be aware that it’s driven by the person with a disability, not the care organizations and we see that this could be a massive iss...

This was unbelievable to me that I had to have these conversations around what is a disability and a chronic illness, what made this situation so unbelievable was the fact that the person involved was a younger support worker and it shows me that we need to have a serious push for education around disability and what disability support is and that it does involve a large amount of care.   I am finding it harder and harder to deal with the lack of general education of the support workers and their unwillingness to see that because I am high functioning doesn’t mean that I am not disabled, and we see that people need to be aware of this and we see that many disability advocates are working both online and offline that are willing to come and work with people to learn about “hidden disabilities” so these being disabilities that aren’t obvious to people at first glance and we see that people are becoming more aware of this and this is great but there isn’t a great deal of informal su...

So this video  and this blog post came on the back of what I outlined in my post about what a support worker can and can’t do for you and we see that it’s view count is still rising, and I think that we now need to step back and have a little chat about the reality of living with a disability and  doing some myth busting around it but I need people to be aware of a couple of things before we dive in these being that these are only my lived experiences and not universal experiences but we see that people do have to deal with this all the time and it might not be as a result of your disability but as a result of poor support and care and this we see can lead to a massive amount of harm and we see that this level of harm can lead to very poor physical and mental health outcomes and this is the first thing that I would like people to know that living with a disability isn’t “cute” or funny it is downright hard work and that is the second thing I would like people to know that I wo...

 I need people to be aware that this blog post is from my lived experience as a person with a disability.  It is something that we do need to talk about is that I have talked at length about it in other blog posts so it needs to be talked about this is what a support worker can and can’t do for someone and this is a difficult topic to be objective about for me because I have had very poor care and at the same time fantastic care.  I can’t seem to reconcile the two together as it has kept me off balance for a long time, but a support worker is there to help you to be more independent and not less independent and we see that this can be a massive issue if a person doesn’t know what good support work looks like.  Or is unable to define what their limits are for a support worker working with challenging clients.  This could potentially be quite dangerous due to a person not being able to speak up due to experiences with support workers in the past and this is wh...

So, regarding the duty of care, we saw that this is a topic that not a lot of support workers understand in depth. At the time of writing and recording, I am currently in the process of changing support agencies for community access. We see that people know the term but at the same time do not understand it since people are unable to define the concept of duty of care and support and they need to be tightly defined to be able to understand what people are talking about. As we do hear and see a lot about a lack of duty of care and it is a legal concept in nursing, childcare, foster care, teaching, and disability services, just to name a few services that have it embedded into the model of care as it is a part of the care that is needed for a person.  It is defined as that a person who is responsible for a child or an adult is responsible for the other person a child or a vulnerable adult and this means that they have a legal obligation to protect the person they are caring for or ...

  What is a good support agency and how do pick one we see that this is more complex than just going with one, as you need to consider a lot of things that we see can be a massive factor in choosing the right support agency for you?   You need to look at a lot of factors, some things that seem obvious like do you like their ethics, do they have space for you, do they treat you as a human and not a cash cow, and what happens if they need to cancel and you have plans as some support services promise person-centred care but deliver very poor levels of support and backup to the clients and their families leading to family conflict and wondering if having a support agency is even worth it and worth the drama of trying to get good support.   As I have been wondering this myself. As I am starting to see that this is something that we need to talk about as it’s an ongoing issue there is no formal standard for the deliveries of support in an agency setting and it can be hard t...

  This is a continuation of a series of posts I have done and I see that it’s something that needs to be talked about and that is the culture in disability service organizations and in particular in the office as we see that I had a comment saying that a person with a disability should never be seen as just a cash cow and if you are treated this way to speak up. Also, I have realized that the office culture regardless of the industry goes across all industries and it’s not just related to health and disability care as they are co-adjacent industries. We see that people are unwilling to admit in the disability sector that they are the problem and if they admit that the office culture is the problem this then means that they need to change, and change means disruptions and it’s not a disruption to the client as a lot of clients are trained to not complain or speak up due to fear of being labeled a complainer when this is what needs to happen we need people to speak up. Both Clients...

Person-centred wording is something that we need to be aware of but we need to be aware that it has two sides and it is rooted in what we call the social model of disability and this says that as a person with a disability we don’t need fixing that the world needs to accommodate the needs of people with a disability much better that in currently does. Most people respect this wording but we see that it has it’s challenged in that some people due to the industry they work in are much more comfortable with the medical model of disability and the wording it provides as it makes their life so much easier and we see that some people. Mostly online are trying to police this and we see that it’s actually in fighting between people with a disability as the medical model at times is the framework that needs to be worked in and there needs to be the technical wording used and as long as it is respectfully I do wonder what we need to be aware of in what harm using this framework is doing, as ...