In short: We’ve got a great conversation going about the ins and outs of new ways people can find support workers. Read on for our latest addition!

It all started with the fourth piece in our confusion-clearing and myth-busting series about the NDIS: ‘Is it true that self management means hiring all my workers?’ We received great responses to this piece, and asked one commenter, Ellen Fraser-Barbour, to write a guest blog post based on her thoughts and concerns around the new ways people with disability can hire their support workers.

We published her piece ‘Yes we want to hire workers more easily. But let’s also talk safeguards and support’, which then inspired us to seek responses from three new kinds of organisations: Better Caring, Hireup and MySupports.

To recap, the three issues Ellen raised in her blog post are:

Issue 1: How do we show commitment to building trust between people with a disability, families, workers and organisations?

Issue 2: What avenues are there for disclosing issues safely and confidentially if things go wrong between individuals and their workers?

Issue 3: Who is responsible for offering professional development to individuals, their families or their workers as we navigate this new NDIS world?

Why these three organisations? Because they represent the different kinds of options and because they are all interested in people taking greater control of their services and supports and to assisting more people self manage. There are other organisations that provide similar services to those listed above, and we recommend doing your own research before deciding on who can best support you in hiring support staff.

Before you read their responses to Ellen’s issues it’s important to know some of the differences between them. It provides an important framework for their responses.

Hireup is actually an employer. They just help people connect with each other via an online platform as opposed to a physical office.

Better Caring is a an online platform that connects people with disability to self employed people (independent contractors). This means their relationship to people on their platform is a bit different to Hireup.

Lastly, we invited MySupports to respond. They are also an employer. We invited them because of their commitment to employing people with disabilities and family carers, and because of their interest in promoting and developing self directed supports.

We thank Ellen, particularly, for her contribution to this important and growing conversation. We’ve edited the organisations’ responses for length and cohesion, but we’ll provide links to responses these organisations post to their own pages over the coming weeks. As always, if you’d like to add your thoughts, experiences and questions to the conversation, you can leave a comment below or on our Facebook page, or send us an email.

We’ll now hand over to Better Caring, Hireup and My Supports, whose responses are on the following pages.

Better Caring – next page

Hireup – page 3

My Supports – page 4