Thank you again for your continued engagement, interest and support. I wish you a restful break and wonderful new year.

2016 has been quite the year, hasn’t it? With full scheme NDIS roll-out from July we have seen really big differences between trial implementation processes and new processes created for participants coming in to the Scheme from July. It has been a huge effort to understand these processes, keep up with them, and then communicate them.

The key to NDIS success is a well-informed participant body. Absolutely crucial. I don’t believe that any major reform ever comes ready-made from on high. Change comes from the ‘bottom-up’, when people can grasp the opportunities for themselves and others. I am proud of our achievements in this area and especially thank Katy Gagliardi who undertook an internship with us and has done a stellar job in communicating a great deal of practical information.

It became especially quickly clear that information on really cool things about the NDIS like self management, plan management and supports co-ordination, were not getting the airing or understanding they needed to make them real choices for people in reality. All participants should have the ability to think through every choice in relation to the NDIS for themselves. We have tried to really fill this gap with clear and accurate information.

Around this we have developed a number of well-received workshops around the NDIS. Again we heard over and over from people that they left most workshops feeling more confused. We have been determined to do something different – bringing accurate, practical and grasp-able sessions for people. We know our pre-planning support assisted people to get good outcomes from the NDIS and wanted to share this knowledge with others. So we have thoroughly enjoyed working with more than a dozen services and informal support and carers groups to run over 25 workshops and will continue offering them in 2017. If you are interested, give us a hoy.

2016 has seen us become registered provider for Supports Co-ordination. This proved to be a large exercise for most small organisations, as it was based on processes created around large traditional disability service providers. We are also working on registration for NDIS categories that will help us to deliver our Micro Enterprise Project to as many people in Sydney who feel it would benefit them.

Supports Co-ordination (and Plan Management) – boring names for some cool things in the NDIS! And BTW we have a workshop titled just this to help you understand these things more and what benefit they can bring.

NDIS funding inevitably means more services. We need those services to be working towards outcomes in our lives that bring us solid foundations – work, relationships, home, contribution based on our potential … A life well lived by our own definition! Services are not an end in themselves, they should always be part of the means to something we feel is important.

How can you breathe life in to your NDIS plan? As always, we will be looking to share our learnings in our practice of supports co-ordination, to help people make real change in their lives, and get creative and flexible outcomes from their NDIS plans.

We believe that it is very important that supports co-ordination is also about practices that support inclusion and community connecting.  We need it to be more than a case management service.

Lastly it has been such a thrill this year to embark on a partnership with Community Living Project to deliver their highly successful and evaluated program assisting people to start their own micro or small niche enterprise. Kyle Wiebe is responsible for the program in Sydney, we have gotten started with participants who wish to dedicate resources to this and are very excited for its expansion in 2017. Kyle comes with business and community development experience and it has been great to see people benefit from this experience, and Kyle benefit from the experience and expertise of people with disability.

We will continue to remain open, informative, collaborative and promoting the value of lived experience in creating change.

Thank you so much again, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year

Libby

This is the sixth post in our blog series about some of the common confusions and inconsistencies we’ve heard from people coming out of NDIS planning meetings. We’ve been responding to some of these as they’ve come up. If you’ve heard anything else about the NDIS process that doesn’t sound quite right, please let us know!

Another confusion we’ve come across is around Plan Management and Supports Coordination.

To recap on what these things are, plan management is one of the three ways you can manage your NDIS funds. With plan management, you have the flexibility to pay for both registered and unregistered providers with your NDIS funds. Once your plan is approved, your Plan Manager (who will need to be NDIS registered) will deal with the financial and administrative side of your plan, and can do some service co-ordination tasks as well.

Plan management is great if you want more control over how your needs are met but you either don’t want to deal with the financial and administrative side of things, or the procedural decision around the float for self-managers (which is currently being challenged) makes self-management unviable.

Supports Coordination (or ‘Coordination of Supports’) is when someone helps you to implement your plan, to get started and find services and supports in your local community. If you receive supports co-ordination, it is a separately funded part of your Plan [within this link, do a search for ‘Coordination of Supports’].

The development of Supports Coordination is a construct developed by the NDIA. The role of Supports Coordination includes:

• Supporting implementation and identifying options for all supports in the plan, including informal, mainstream and community, as well as funded supports,
• Strengthening and enhancing people’s abilities to coordinate supports and participate in the community, reach decisions and develop agreements with support providers, and
• Building people’s capacity to achieve greater independence, self-direct supports in the longer term and understand funding flexibility.

What’s all this code for? Supports Coordination is far more than “just” case management. At a forum run by the NDIA in Sydney on 2 December, it was stated that Supports Co-ordination is about helping to put people’s desires for different outcomes into effect. It was also about looking beyond funded supports. Supports co-ordinators play critical roles in linking people to mainstream services and facilitating the acceptance of and engagement with those services and organisations.

More information about Supports Coordination can be found here.

Although there can be overlap between ‘plan management’ and ‘supports coordination’, you can also see that the two also have key differences.

We’ve heard that people are having difficulty in their first NDIS planning meeting because a question is being asked along the lines of ‘How do you want your plan managed?’ Then there is a list that includes both supports coordination and plan management, and you can only choose one of these options.

But what if you want a Plan Manager to help manage your NDIS funds AND you need supports coordination to help implement your Plan and work out what to spend those funds on?

Based on the direct experiences of people in their planning meetings, if this happens in your planning meeting, we suggest that you choose ‘supports coordination’, and then ask for ‘plan management’ to be noted in the comments or elsewhere as an additional request.

Why? Because the option to plan manage your NDIS funds is not subject to the ‘reasonable and necessary’ decision-making framework. Plan management is your legislated right as per Section 43 of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (unless you have ever been insolvent, which is the same if you want to self manage). Because Supports Coordination is subject to the ‘reasonable and necessary’ framework, you need to make sure you ask for it in your meeting, state why it is ‘reasonable and necessary’, and select Supports Coordination when asked ‘How do you want your plan managed?’ It is very important that these arguments as to why Supports Coordination is ‘reasonable and necessary’ are recorded appropriately in the main part of the data collection process, rather than just noted somewhere.

If you follow the above and your plan still comes back as ‘agency managed’ (this is actually happening to people), then you are less likely to need to request a Review, because plan management is not subject to the ‘reasonable and necessary’ framework. What you would need to do is get in touch with your NDIS planner or LAC and get this changed. If you don’t get a timely response, you would then need to follow the complaints process.

We hope this has been helpful. As always, if information you’ve heard from the NDIA contradicts anything we’ve written here, please leave a comment below or send us an email.

If you’d like to learn more about Supports Coordination, check out some of the services InCharge provides here.