Thoughts about some simple changes to the NDIS that would make life so much better

 

 So this has been on my mind for a while now and it’s the outright misinformation that is out there about disability and the NDIS, I am finding despite the chorus of content creators trying to educate people the legacy media seems to be louder and more persistent, but at the core lets be real the system is broken and we need to do better for everyone from support staff to Allied health professionals that write the reports to get us the funding we need at times that funding isn’t enough and then that is where the blame game starts around cost blowouts and people gaming the systems.

So that brings me to the hairy end of the topic is the blame game and people thinking that participants have it easy( if you’re your decision maker it’s not) it can seem like a full-time job and this is where people get so wrong about who to blame as there is not an easy fix but there is several that are starting to emerge, the cost guide cap is a big one.

Cracking down on dodgy providers and my personal favourite but I am not sure if this is included in the reports is a mandatory level of training for support workers who are in client-facing roles, Including but not limited to Medication awareness, awareness of behaviours of concern vs challenging behaviours as we know that behaviours are learnt and a choose, so let's get training on that one as well, it seems to me that in bringing people with a disability into the community it hasn’t been thought threw long term.

We see that the people who are at the top of our elected positions are the ones to blame as they seem to have, since the inception of the NDIS not consulted a single disabled person in their lives, but have created an underclass of people who need support but can’t access it and are having to rely on underfunded state or community charity based systems.

We are now starting to talk about it and it seems to me that the legacy media want to talk about the cost but not talk about the people like myself who have been able to do things that contribute to the economy in a non-tax paying way as if we counted the cost of having to pay volunteer’s many of the charities that rely on them wouldn’t be comically viable.

This is where it gets tricky as well what would happen if we start to pay them as many disabled advocates are asking to get paid for their work I know I have talked about this before but one major change that I can see that would stop the abuse neglect and explosion of people with a disability is quite simple, Mandatory training and onboarding of support workers and the onboarding be mandatory at an origination level so this being that you're not working with any clients until your properly onboarded as it would then safeguard the people, because we don’t talk about safeguarding in disability as it is supposed to be built into the dignity of risk and duty of care, but I feel that we need a low level of safeguarding for everyone’s safety and dignity. I saw a support worker hand over a phone to keep a client occupied but they changed the Facebook profile would it have been easier to have a pay phone or a phone that isn’t connected to the internet this is what I am talking about when I am talking on other platforms about support staff taking the easy way out.

Let me be clear it’s not always the staff's fault often agencies have very little organizational structure and backup from the office so why would they do the incident reports if they are simply going to get questioned for what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

But this is to me where good solid onboarding is critical when I attempted to be a support worker well it didn’t work as I had very little backup from the agency if any and the person had higher needs than I was told and needed a lot more services than anyone realised it was that she needed a farm hand rather than a support worker, so this is where onboarding in an office would have made a world of difference in what support the support workers are given and yes it would be a cost to the organization upfront but the long term costs would be reduced in a lack of staff turnover as they know what they are to do and policies and procedures aren’t made up on the fly but have the client and staff in mind.

It seems to me that we have in the cost blowouts forgotten about the people who are reconvening the support to live a life with dignity and respect at the core of it.

So I know that a lot of issues can be stopped by training but we also need many voices calling for an end to politicians and LACs making it harder for us to navigate an already complex system, that seems to me like an ongoing episode of utopia ( the ABC show about how government process seem to work / or don’t work and where the money is going )

I don’t have enough awareness to be competing on the political side of all of this except to say that the last great statesperson we had before we completely went to being tied to the  USA and the perceived threat of China was Jula Gullard the person who signed the NDIS into law but since then we haven’t had an effective government we have had personality cults and people blocking reasonable changes to the law, so my question is what are they trying to hide in that they don’t want a water register in NSW or at a federal level don’t want an anti-corruption body. Well, that is the question is who has the ear of our federal politicians and how do we get back to a place where it’s for the good of the common man and in this case, people with a disability brought to the table to talk about our needs instead of people assuming what we need.