Annie in wonderland

  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 ...

  What is passive support and how does it create risks in the NDIS, so passive support is as complex as active support but it is more of a hands-off approach so it is person-centered in a way that there is a minimum direction in what people are being given when they are paying for the support it often happens in people who are higher functioning and are capable of making their own decisions but need support in a practical sense.   So this is practical support, in activities of daily living and we see that if a support worker makes assumptions, we see that this is where the risk of passive support comes in and there are times when it is very appropriate in a person with a disability. However, when a support worker is too hands-off we can see it leading to situations if the support worker isn’t fully aware of their client's disabilities it can lead to situations that can lead to the potential for harm so this is where it needs to be balanced with support and this is a very h...

  What is Active support and how does it help people with a disability,   so active support is where the person's abilities are at the core of the support so it’s a level of support where the person with a disability and not their care team is involved in their support and make the major decisions around what they do day to day.  We see that this is the flip side to something that I talked about called Passive support that can cause harm in a person with a disability and we see that harm in support is a topic that isn’t often talked about and often people with a disability are gaslighted into believing that what the provider is giving them is what they wanted. It might be what they need but given the nature of support work a support worker needs to know the person well to provide good support and when it’s app apart to provider active support vs passive support as both are needed but passive support carries the risk of deskilling a person leading to maladaptive coping b...

Why passive support leads to harm in disability support. So this is going to be a really hard topic to address but it needs addressing and this is because a lot of service providers don’t really understand the potential for harm in having passive support, so there are generally two forms of support one being passive support and the other being active and passive support is when a support worker does things for the client and this leads them to have fewer skills, this can be due to several things and this is quite interesting because one major one is a lack of training of the support worker and a lack of ongoing professional development training and we see that this can be a massive issue because there is no set requirement for a direct support worker to have and this, as I have stated in other formats, can be both a good and a bad thing because people need to be flexible in how they receive care.   In some cases where a person has very complex needs the support worker woul...

This post and the video are going to generate some heat but it’s something that needs to be talked about we see that this is something that not a lot of people get as well that there is a major able-bodied disability but I am talking when it is obvious to the person that they are capable of doing things for themselves but don’t have the motivation to do it for themselves or they want to do it but they get angry when people suggest that they could do it for themselves.  Or they get angry when people call them out on it and this is where we need to define what is the difference between a disability and an excuse and what can we do about it as a disability is something where people do need help and they can be helped and accept that help but when they aren’t able to accept that help or see that they can do it for themselves we see that people are aware of it and don’t often want to be able to be helped or they get angry because they are used to being excused. After all, they have a di...

This is something that I have had in draft form for a while but it needs to be said and that you are not a burden as we see that in coming up to Christmas we will have well meaning but uninformed people talking to us about life and asking us when we are getting a Job, going back to study or moving out of home.  Also l feel that this time of year for a lot of people brings a lot of stress so we need to say to people you are not a burden and  if you look at the volunteer hours if you had to pay someone what people with disabilities do their would be a massive economic burden to this and often people with disability’s do this for free, or for under the award wages. We also see that people are talking about what is in the news and often this is the NDIS and we see that this is a whole other issue due to the fact that people see it as a  cost blow out and don’t really understand that it is a complex program and often it’s not the clients that are defrauding the system it i...

  So this is a continuation of my series on disability support services and office culture and ethics and I am hoping in this post to answer some of the questions I asked in the previous posts about the services and support people how do you manage this to make sure they are effective, well-trained and right for the person using the service and how do you spot if the company has a good ethical framework that is apart from the thinking about disability as a moral failing.  As if the disability is thought about as a form of morality does this then give the service providers the right to take a medical model approach to disability what type of framework is this mindset working from and how is it a good framework to work with who does it help the service provider or the person they are supposed to support?  This is a dangerously outdated model of care and it states at its core that disability is something to be ashamed of and therefore you need to be cured to be of worth to...

  Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that  I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.      So this is a continuation of disability and ethics in disability service providers, I found that I needed to go back and seek out the very basics around this to educate myself on this as well.   As, unfortunately, ethics can be a tricky subject when it comes to disability because personal ethics play a role as well, and personal ethics vary from person to person and the training from disability service providers varies from person to person and organization to organization as well as having a good framework that they work from.   A good ethical framework is one that everyone from the boss down is aw...