Brain Injury SA has been providing the Decision Support Pilot Program in South Australia since 2018.
The pilot, funded by the Department of Social Services, provided decision-making support for people with limited decision-making capacity, and no other appropriate decision supports to engage with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Since the commencement of the Decision Support Pilot, Brain Injury SA has supported over 90 people in various ways, to navigate access to NDIS.
In this, the final year of the program, BISA engaged with 22 of these clients, transitioning them to NDIS funding or alternate supports to continue their applications. Several clients who fit the eligibility criteria for BISA’s general Advocacy service have remained with our service while they await an outcome.
The Decision Support Pilot Program provided support with a number of challenges commonly faced by our participants, which included:
- Difficulty gathering up-to-date medical evidence for a NDIS application, including long wait times for access to medical information.
- Resistance and lack of understanding from mainstream health providers regarding NDIS processes and providing evidence necessary to facilitate access to the scheme.
- Obtaining support from busy General Practitioner’s (GP) having insufficient time in their day-to-day practice to provide a treating professionals report as part of the NDIS application process.
- Extra GP costs to clients due to non-availability of bulk billing.
- Financial costs constraints for people needing to obtain Functional Capacity Assessments.
- Assessments that are crucial evidence when applying for access to NDIS. From experience, insufficient evidence of a person’s day to day functional capacity is often given as a reason for an applicant’s rejection by NDIS.
- Limited access to low-cost Functional Capacity Assessments that often have associated long wait lists due to demand. The same applies as for other necessary tests, for example Neuropsychology reports.
- Clients remembering information or following up on tasks. This would often lead to the NDIS application process taking many months and documentation not being sufficiently recent.
- The changing physical and emotional health of clients would also impact on their ability to engage in the application process.
- Confusion in understanding complex NDIS processes, policies, and navigating their systems either by phone or online.
Funding from the Department of Social Services for the Decision Support Pilot across Australia ended as of 30 June 2023. This is because the NDIA has developed a Supported Decision Making Policy, whereby a NDIA planner can now support people to engage directly with the NDIA.
The NDIA states that they have worked closely with people with disability to develop the Supported Decision Making policy. This policy is about helping everyone understand what supported decision making is, and how NDIS can better support people with disability to make decisions with the NDIS. This includes things like applying, setting goals and how to use the supports in participants’ plans. The Policy will start to be implemented in 2023.
More information on this policy is available on the NDIS website: Supported decision making policy | NDIS
