Five tips for smoothly accessing the NDIS

We’re back, baby! NDIS Know-how has returned for a second season of decoding Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and helping families get the supports they need. 

Season two kicks off with Lisa Duffy, an affable expert in the disability space who spends her work days at Disability Services Consulting (DSC), where she develops and delivers training and resources to translate the NDIS to NDIS Support Coordinators and the wider community. 

Here’s a sneak peek of some of the pointers Lisa shares around how to make the process of applying for the NDIS as pain-free as possible. Tune into the whole chat here. 

Learn the lingo

You need to know how to ‘speak NDIS’ so that you can ask your treating professionals and support team to use NDIS language in the reports and evidence that they're going to provide to you for the application, as supporting evidence 

We’ll often work with families who have a specialist doctor who’ll write something around the person’s diagnosis. They’ll list the person’s recent scans, their medication list, and then sign off the letter without making commentary around how their diagnosis impacts their function. However, evidence of how a person’s diagnosed disability profoundly impacts their function is critical when making an application to the NDIS.

NDIS applicants and their support networks need to be able to ask their report writers to document how the diagnosed disability impacts their function in at least one of these six domains: mobility, communication, social interaction, learning, self-care and self-management.  

Gather top-notch evidence

The NDIS provides a list of what it considers to be good evidence, who can provide evidence and how old or new this evidence can be. Treating professionals, like an occupational therapist, specialist doctor or psychologist, for example, can provide evidence of functional impact. 

Applicants need to think about who is already in their life that could act as a treating professional in this process. If there isn't anyone - or they have to find new ones -  they’ll need to take into account the waiting time there might be to get those assessments and reports. Also consider the cost of these professionals' time and expertise which can sometimes be over $1,000 when you include the cost of the report. 

Think broadly about who can give evidence

There may already be people in your life who could provide evidence of how your disability impacts your function. For example, there might be someone who knows you from your school who can provide a great report on evidence of how your disability impacts your function in the learning, mobility and communication categories. Maybe there's a support teacher who can provide great evidence of seeing the challenges you might experience in expressive communication, and social interaction, for example. 

Don’t just think about specialists and therapists. Think about the people in your mainstream world, too, perhaps working in education or mental health. These people can provide reports that might not be as expensive and might not have as much of a waiting time, but can still potentially provide very thorough assessment and documentation of the functional impacts of your disability.

Be kind to yourself

For people who have what the NDIS calls a List A diagnosis, applying for the NDIS could potentially lead to a successful outcome within a month. For other people, this process can take over a year due to the detailed evidence you may need to collect. It can also be quite confronting because you’re having to talk about all of the ways that your diagnosis impacts your life. 

Have support around you and be kind to yourself, because this can be a difficult process and it can be quite slow. If you think that you do meet the NDIS access criteria, don’t give up, and get support with the process if you need it. The funding that can come from being an eligible NDIS participant can be life-changing. 

Listen to Lisa Duffy on the NDIS Know-how podcast and stay tuned for new episodes dropping fortnightly.