At Hireup, we offer a wide range of support. Whether it’s to help you catch the train or prepare meals for the week, we have workers available to support you in every aspect of your life. Specialised support, however, is a less well-known support we offer. So, we sat down with Hireup Co-founder, Laura O’Reilly, to talk about it and why specialised support is a priority for Hireup.
Why is specialised support important at Hireup?
For me, it all comes back to my brother Shane.
Shane had a quite severe form of cerebral palsy, and needed support around the clock. He was PEG fed, needed to be hoisted, and had daily medication routines. He needed fairly complex support.
In 2021, I had a conversation with my mum about Shane. She told me that she didn't think that Shane would have been using Hireup, because his specialised support needs would have been so great that Hireup wouldn't have worked for him.
For me, that was like a red rag to a bull. I thought, “OK, we’ve got to change”. We needed to make sure that Hireup would have worked for Shane had he been alive in 2021. Being able to provide high-quality complex support and have a workforce capable of delivering that support was really important.
What I've observed in my own life is that the more complex people's support needs are, the more choice and control is imperative.
If you need to rely on someone to give you medications, to hoist you, or to feed you - my goodness, you want to have a choice over who that person is. And we are here to facilitate choice and control.
So, if we want to help people like my brother and make sure that everybody can have choice and control, well, we have to be really good at specialised support.
Some people don’t think about Hireup for specialised support. What’s one thing you want to say to them?
I think you're right, there are people who don't think of Hireup as the place to go for specialised support.
It’s totally understandable, and reflects where we were four years ago, but not where we are today. We've spent the last three years really working hard on building our specialised support capability in our support office and across our workforce.
So, to your question, the one thing I would want people to know is that Hireup really is good at specialised support and we provide specialised support to hundreds of people with disability right across the country. So I would say to people to give us a go.
What was the moment you realised that specialised support could be done better by the sector?
The catalyst for all the work that we do, including the provision of specialised support at Hireup, was Shane's lived experience. I can't really think of one specific moment, but there were just a thousand moments where he needed significant levels of 24/7 support, and the system just let him down .
And there were just so many experiences before the NDIS where you’d get a knock on the door at 6am, and you wouldn’t know who the worker was because the agency sent them. You’d think, “Are they going to connect with Shane?”. On many, many occasions the chemistry wasn’t there and it was like fingernails on a chalkboard.
It was this collection of experiences that showed us that support could be done better. We knew that things would be much better if Shane himself was in control of his supports and who was supporting him. That was the insight that lead to Hireup.
I'm determined to continue to build [Hireup] for Shane. The fact that he died four years before a line of code was written makes no difference for me. His experiences are the north star which guide what we're trying to do here.
My whole life's work is about using the lessons I learned from my brother’s experiences to try to make supports better for people with disability, so that people in the future don't face the same barriers and challenges Shane faced.
We want people with complex disability, who might need to be hoisted or PEG fed or supported according to a Behaviour Support plan, to have access to choice and control over their supports. That's my whole life's mission. And so that's what Hireup is going to do.
