Disability Loop - Report - Disability Loop Gap Analysis Roundtable One

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Report - Disability Loop Gap Analysis Roundtable One

Disability Loop hosted a roundtable in February 2015. A roundtable is a meeting where people come together to talk about something and work out what should happen next. Groups that represent people with disability across the country were invited. These groups all talked about NDIS projects, about gaps in the information about the NDIS, and more. We put all of the information about this meeting into a report which you can read below.

You can read the report below, or download it as a DOCX or PDF:

Disability Loop Roundtable One

Gap Analysis - February 24, 2015

Who came to this meeting?

Groups that represent people with disability across the country were invited. These groups all work at a national level. The people who came were:

Sue Barnes – People with Disability Australia

Bob Buckley – A4 Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia

Samantha Connor – Women with Disabilities Australia

Dwayne Cranfield – National Ethnic Disability Alliance

Stephanie Gotlib – Children with Disability Australia

Aine Healy – Independence Australia

Mary Mallet – Disability Advocacy Network Australia

Kyle Miers – Deaf Australia

Nick Rushworth – Brain Injury Australia

Erika Webb – Blind Citizens Australia

Ruth Webber - Down Syndrome Australia

Steve Williamson – Deafness Forum Australia

Who was invited but were not able to come?

Matthew Bowden – People with Disability Australia (Sue Barnes came in his place)

Carolyn Frohmader – Women with Disabilities Australia (Samantha Connor came in her place)

Damian Griffis – First People’s Disability Network

Mark Pattison – Independence Australia (Aine Healy came in his place)

Sam Millard – Short Statured People of Australia

What was the meeting about?

This meeting was called a roundtable. A roundtable is a meeting where people come together to talk about something and work out what should happen next.

This meeting had two parts.

The first part was to talk about the Disability Loop and other NDIS projects.

The second part was to ask the people there what the gaps are in the NDIS and what they think should happen next. We were most interested in what information is missing. We also found out about some things that are going well or not going well in the way the NDIS works.

Disability Loop staff also wanted to plan ahead. Because of this, we asked about what roundtables the Disability Loop project should have.

What will happen to the information from this meeting?

The information from this meeting will be given to the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) in a report. We will also meet with the NDIA to talk about what we have learned.

This report will be placed on the Disability Loop website under ‘Resources’.

What else will Disability Loop do after this meeting?

There are some things we need to act on from the meeting. They are:

Disability Loop Website

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will let everyone know when the website is ready to use.

Other NDIS Projects

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will give the contact details and PowerPoint presentations from all the presenters that spoke to the people who came to the meeting.

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will talk to staff from the projects at Mental Health Australia, National Disability Services and Carers Australia regularly. They will keep each other updated about what they are doing.

Disability Support Organisation (DSO) Project

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will give people who came to the meeting Jackie’s contact details and a copy of her PowerPoint presentation.

ACTION: Disability Loop staff and DSO Project staff will stay in contact regularly.

Gap Analysis

ACTION: Disability Loop will put the ideas from this session into a report for the NDIS. We will make sure you know what we’ve said in the report. We will also keep you updated about what the NDIS does with this information.

Disability Loop Planning

ACTION: Disability Loop will organise a roundtable to give the NDIS ideas about how people with intellectual disability can have a say in how the NDIS is run. We will keep talking to people who have ideas about how this roundtable should work. This roundtable will be held in the second half of 2015.

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will keep thinking about a roundtable on people who fall through the gaps. This will mean talking to lots of people about how this roundtable might work. There is no set timeframe for this roundtable.

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will develop an action plan about what is reasonable and necessary in the NDIS. This will be done in the second half of 2015.

Session One: About Disability Loop

Who ran this session?

Catherine McAlpine – Senior Manager, Disability Loop

Leah van Poppel – Manager, Disability Loop

What were the key points?

Disability Loop has been funded by the National Disability Insurance Agency (the Agency) for two years. It has three staff: Catherine McAlpine (Senior Manager), Leah van Poppel (Manager) and Jean Cotchin (Communications Officer).
Disability Loop will give information about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to people with disability and their families. This will be through a website and social media. There will also be an NDIS Champions program and a Train the Trainer program to help people with disability and their organisations learn more about the NDIS.
Disability Loop will also take information back to the NDIS about what they can do better. This will be through regular reports and meetings. The ideas will come from asking people what they think in person, in surveys and at roundtables. We will let you know as much about our reports to the Agency as we can.
Disability Loop aims to show all the good ways to make information easy to use, especially for people with disabilities. This will take time, and we will need to learn along the way.

Session Two: Disability Loop Website

Who ran this session?

Catherine McAlpine, Senior Manager Disability Loop

What were the key points?

Catherine showed the people at the meeting what the front page of the Disability Loop site will look like. She also showed what a page might look like when you go to any other page.
The website will have lots of news and resources about the NDIS. Most of the resources will be things that already exist. Some of these might need to be put into different formats, like Auslan videos or Easy English. Disability Loop will create new resources or make older ones easier to use where there are gaps.
Disability Loop will also have an email newsletter that anyone can sign up for.
Disability Loop will be as easy to use as possible. This does not mean it will always be perfect. Catherine asked everyone to let the Disability Loop team know if there are problems with using the website when it goes live.
We will try to make sure that people who don’t have internet access can get the same information as people who use Disability Loop.

What will happen now?

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will let everyone know when the website is ready to use.

Session Three: Other NDIS Projects

Who ran this session?

Liz Ruck, Mental Health Australia

Liz Neville and James Bannister, National Disability Services

Catherine McAlpine, Senior Manager Disability Loop (presenting information from Carers Australia)

What were the main points?

Mental Health Australia has been working with people who have a mental illness and their carers and service providers on NDIS projects. Some of this work has been to tell people about the NDIS. Sometimes they have asked people what needs to be done differently in the NDIS.
At the moment their project is focusing on peer support. They have a group of mental health consumers who know about the NDIS and are willing to teach others. They will be running a Train the Trainer program to help these people speak up.
Mental health consumers are saying they need a lot of different ways to get into the NDIS.
They would like to see ways for mental health consumers to talk about recovery when they make plans in the NDIS.
National Disability Services have been working on two projects.
One project will make sure disability service providers have good up-to-date information about how to change the way they work in the NDIS. They are updating a toolkit for service providers as the NDIS changes.
The other project is to give money to service providers to design services with their clients (co-design). There will be eleven funded service providers across Australia, who will work with five clients each. This will help the service providers think differently. It will also mean there will be lots of personal stories about how things can be done differently.
Carers Australia is doing some work on peer support. They will create a training package to help carers and families be peer support leaders in each of the NDIS trial sites.

What will happen now?

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will give the contact details and PowerPoint presentations from all the presenters that spoke to the people who came to the meeting.

Session Four: Julia Farr Association (JFA) Purple Orange

Disability Support Organisations (DSO) Project

Who ran this session?

Jackie Hayes, JFA Purple Orange

What were the key points?

Disability Support Organisations (DSOs) are organisations that run peer support groups for people with disability. Some of the groups in the DSO project use different names to describe themselves.
18 DSOs have been funded across Australia as part of this project. Each DSO will support up to 20 local groups.
Some DSOs will hire people to help the local groups. Sometimes these people will be called community connectors. Some DSOs might use a different name for them.
Most of the DSOs are hiring staff and doing work plans at the moment.
The DSOs will meet during the project so they can learn from each other.
The project will have a website for the peer support groups and the DSOs. This is being designed with ideas from the DSOs. The website will be run by Julia Farr Association.
The project will also look at how pre-planning for the NDIS can be done well.

What will we do now?

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will give people who came to the meeting Jackie’s contact details and a copy of her PowerPoint presentation.

ACTION: Disability Loop staff and DSO Project staff will stay in contact regularly.

Session Five: Disability Loop Gap Analysis

Who ran this session?

Leah van Poppel, Manager Disability Loop

What were the key points?

Everybody thought that it was important to make information and services from the NDIS as easy to use as possible right from the start. This is called universal design.
The people at the meeting were asked what should be changed on the NDIS website. They suggested lots of things, including:
- Use simpler language
- Have one easy way to enter the website. This could be by giving a bit of information about your disability and your location to get information just designed for you.
- Have a way for users to chat to someone from the NDIS online easily. This may be a problem for people who are Deaf.
- Use visual information – pictures of different disability types or a map to talk about eligibility.
- Give people the chance to choose what news and information they want in email updates.
- Do some market research about what is appealing to people with disabilities – after all, in the NDIS they are customers!
For people who can’t use the website, suggestions included:
- Make sure there is a number you can call, and that staff will be helpful.
- Face to face – make sure staff can take lots of little questions and repeat visits to build up trust.
- Make sure the same information is on websites, printed fact sheets and DVDs.
- Fix some gaps in information for disability groups – some are making their own fact sheets.
The group also talked about getting ready for the NDIS, and suggested:
- Workshops to help people get ready for the NDIS are not giving good information sometimes. In some places there are not enough workshops.
- Some States and Territories have done better at helping people to get ready for the NDIS than others.

This was a long part of the meeting where there were lots of good ideas. Not every idea has been listed here. However, all the ideas will go to the National Disability Insurance Agency in our report on the gaps in the NDIS.

What will we do now?

Session Six: Disability Loop Planning

Who ran this session?

Catherine McAlpine, Senior Manager Disability Loop

What were the key points?

Disability Loop is going to run five mini projects / roundtables to talk about parts of the NDIS in more detail.
One of these roundtables will be to give the NDIS ideas about how people with intellectual disability can have a say in how the NDIS is run. Everyone thought this was a good idea. Some other people with disabilities – like people with autism – might also have trouble getting their voices heard.
Catherine asked if it would be a good idea to have a roundtable about people who fall through the gaps when it comes to getting disability support. This roundtable would look at people with disabilities who have other things happening in their life which make it hard for them to get the NDIS. This might include people who are homeless or being abused. The group said:
- It would be a good idea. We need to start by working out who we think is falling through the gaps because there are lots of different groups who might be included. For example, some people in institutions fall through the gaps.
- It is important to reach people who are falling through the gaps where they are.
- It is a good idea to teach professionals who don’t know about disability some of the basics so they can give better support. This could include women’s shelter workers or housing workers. Maybe the roundtable can talk about how the NDIS can help these workers.
Catherine said another mini project would be about what is reasonable and necessary to get under the NDIS. She asked what it would be good to talk about at the roundtable. Some ideas were:
- Getting things that might not look like disability supports, like a tumble dryer for a person with one arm, or a gym membership.
- Making sure that nobody will be worse off under the NDIS than they are now. Each State and Territory has different levels of support now, so what is ‘not worse off’ is different across the country. There are some very good things happening in some places, but it is hard to know what the NDIS will keep.

What will we do now?

ACTION: Disability Loop staff will develop an action plan about what is reasonable and necessary in the NDIS. This will be done in the second half of 2015.