 So first of all, thank you for making the time to come to today's session. It's a session that is targeted directly at people who are supporting, people with a disability directly, you're the people out there that have relationships and contacts with the people that the National Disability Insurance Scheme is all about. So thank you for making the time. I appreciate that many of you have come in your own free time, so that's a real show of your commitment to find out about this scheme and how you can assist the people you work with to know that it's coming and how to be prepared for it. Before we start, I'm Sarah King. I'm from the ACT NDIS Task Force. I'm joined by Judith Davis Lee, who is a director with the National Disability Insurance Agency and the agency is the entity that will be running, managing, delivering the National Disability Scheme in Australia, in ACT from one July this year, as it is throughout Australia. Before we start, I would just like to pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the land we're meeting on today, the Ngunnawal people, pay my respects to their elders and leaders past and present and acknowledge and welcome any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders colleagues who are here today. So I'd also like to thank the Disability Learning and Professional Development Network for putting on these sessions. There will be more sessions across the ACT for workers to find out about the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This is one of many more to come. I'd just like to say before we start, the reason it's so important that we have sessions for direct workers is that you are really the face of the service system. You are the people with whom people with a disability rely for information, not just support and services, but for information and probably for a sense of optimism and confidence about what's coming. There has never been a larger, more significant change to the human service system in Australia. It's a monumental change and there will be challenges, trials, tribulations through that journey. But it is, as you'll hear from Judith, one of the most important changes in order to ensure that people with a disability can lead good lives. At the end of the session, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions. If I could just ask you to check your telephones before we start, make sure they're switched off or on silent. And I'd just like to hand over to Judith Davis Lee now. Thank you. Hello everybody. It's lovely to see a full room of people, which means people's interest in what I'm going to talk to you today about is high. So thank you very much for coming. I really appreciate it. As Sarah said, I've been with the National Disability Insurance Agency for almost two years. So I joined them in June 2012 when it wasn't called the agency yet. It had a much longer name. I think it was the National Disability Insurance Scheme Launch Transition Agency, which believe me is a mouthful. So NDIA is much better. Today is the 1st of April. Yeah. Well, I'm not here to play a practical joke. The NDIS really is coming to the ACT. And in fact, it's coming in three months time. Oh my God, three months time. There's an awful lot of work to do before we open the doors, but we are opening the doors on the 1st of July. We might go to the first slide. So all of you clearly have heard about the NDIS and all of you I'm sure in your own way will know that this is something that has been a very, very long time coming for people with disability. More than decades probably. But its most recent history began probably back in about 2008 when after the Rudd government first came to power, they made a commitment to hold a 2020 summit. Does anybody remember that? Yeah. It was very interesting. It was a way of sort of generating big ideas for Australia's future. Well, I think it's safe to say that the NDIS was not just one of the ideas that came out of the summit. It was the big idea that was raised at the 2020 summit in 2008. In fact, it was put forward for consideration among others by Bruce Bonahady, who is now the chair of the NDIS Board. Bruce himself has two adult sons with severe cerebral palsy, has been a service provider, a philanthropist, a leader in the field. And so it was he proposing that this was an idea whose time had come. As a result of that idea, the Australian government then asked the Productivity Commission to conduct an inquiry into the existing care and support arrangements for people with disability across Australia. Again, I'm sure this is something that you're well aware of. The report is some 1,100 pages long, canvassed many thousands of views from people all across Australia. I think it received over a thousand written submissions. That's as well as the discussions and conversations they had with people across the country. And the resounding conclusion was indeed that we needed an NDIS because arrangements, depending on where you live, were either moderately okay, or they were uniformly unfair or fragmented. And so this is one of the legacies of having a federal system where you have state governments with different arrangements in place across Australia. This is an attempt to create a single, nationally consistent, equitable, fair and sustaining scheme for people with disability to make sure that they can live a good life. So it is very new. It's taken quite a radical approach. An approach that I have to say has been trialled in pockets in some places and found to have been quite successful as a type of model. But it is a scheme that will tailor a person's supports to their individual needs. Now, this is an enormous undertaking because it's such a radical shift away from the way things operate currently. So at the moment, in all jurisdictions across Australia, you have governments responding to pockets of need. A program is developed. A funding stream is applied. So many people, X number of, you know, sessions of service in this timeframe. Very rigid, rigid programmatic responses to identified need. This new system is going to unbundle all of those arrangements. It's going to unpick them all. Any program that currently devotes dollars to disability supports for people across Australia, eventually that money will be uncoupled from the program. All of that cash is going to flow into a single national bucket for disability support across Australia, which will then give people with disability the maximum flexibility in what they choose in terms of their disability supports, who provides it, how it is provided. But an enormous change. I don't think I need to convince you about that. We're going to use an insurance approach. So what this really means is that vast amounts of data are going to be gathered over time. So we're very, very new. So we've just had nine months of operation since the first of July last year. If you want to think about it in terms of a lifetime, we're a baby. We've only just been born. I think by nine months, kids are generally crawling. So we're on our hands and knees. We're making our way forward. But clearly we're going to bump into things. We're going to get things wrong. We're going to have to learn to crawl. That cross pattern, that's the best way to do it. So we're moving towards that kind of goal. And hopefully by the end of the first year, like most toddlers, we'll be on our feet. What the insurance approach does, though, is gather all of the data about the outcomes for every individual. This is what's most important. Obviously, all of us want the scheme to be sustainable over the long term. There's absolutely no point starting something like this and have it fail in two or three or four or five years. And so data about the outcomes for individuals. In other words, the disability supports that people are receiving under the scheme and the difference that actually makes to their lives. In other words, the level of participation they're able to take on because of the supports they're getting under the scheme is going to be gathered absolutely carefully for every person, monitored regularly. We have a unit of scheme actuaries who've been employed to look just at those things. And so over time, we'll get a much, much better picture, an evidence base, if you like, about what does work for individuals in their individual circumstances but also be able to aggregate that data up to say for this group of people, this is what seems to work best. And you can see all of that will feed into the future planning for the scheme. So choice and control is central. And I'm pretty sure I don't need to convince any of you about the fundamental importance of individuals being able to exercise choice and control. This is a fundamental human right. And yet the reality is that for people with disability, often they have not had the opportunity to exercise choice or to exercise control over the way they live their lives. And in this scheme, that extends to choice and control over the types of supports they receive, how they receive them, who provides them, and under what circumstances. The other fundamental difference, if we go back to that idea of a need being identified, a program being developed, these are very narrow strictures. So they are not needs-driven. All programs have a funding cap. And once you get to that cap, nobody else can access the funding under that program. That's the way it works. This is not a capped scheme. So people are not given a ceiling to which they can buy services that they need. Their plan is constructed according to their individual circumstances, their individual disability support needs. However, the figure is that comes out at the end of that process, that is what that person is allocated under the scheme. That's a fundamental difference. It's delivered in local communities. Obviously you are part of that local community. So yay, you're in there, boots and all. And we are working towards national coverage. So again, I don't think I'm going to need to convince this audience about the importance of starting small, of getting it right, of making adjustments and improvements as we go along to make sure that by the time we get to that point where we're going to ramp up from the first three years of trial sites to a rollout that's going to go across the nation, we need to have the settings pretty well right. So these first three years are going to be crucial in informing the people who are the scheme architects, all the jurisdictions who've bought in, including the ACT, that we can roll it out in a way that's going to be there for the nation in decades to come and that is going to be sustainable. So this is the picture at the moment. We've got seven trial sites that are being established over the first three years. On the 1st of July last year, we opened our doors and we had four trial sites across seven locations. So they were in Tasmania where we have three shop fronts, the Barwon area of Victoria, which is centred around Geelong. They opened with just an office in Geelong but they've now got an outposted office in Colac. So it probably should be eight. Anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. The Hunter in New South Wales, which currently has an office in Charlestown, and Charlestown sits right on the border of the Newcastle local government area and the Lake Macquarie government area. So it's in between the first two lots of people who will come in. And in South Australia, it's the entire state of South Australia. Who's been to South Australia? It's enormous, isn't it? And the distances between places in South Australia are enormous. Nevertheless, they are doing the whole state for a child cohort. So they're doing from birth up to 14 years. In Tasmania, it's 15 to 24 years. So all those young people who are hitting those transition points about leaving school, thinking about post-school options going into employment. And in Barwon and Hunter, they're doing the entire age group who'll be eligible to access the scheme from birth up to 64. So you can see those three pieces will fit very nicely together. Now the ACT is a little bit different again. So even though we're doing birth to 64 here, commencing in July, we are behaving in the ACT as if this is full scheme rollout. So we are commencing here because the intention is to bring in every single person with disability who will be able to access the scheme over a two-year period. So at the moment, the estimates sit at about 5,000 people. They estimate we'll be eligible to access the scheme. And just how are we going to do that? We haven't quite got the answer in. But you can imagine if we open the doors in our Northbourne Avenue office and in Emu Bank on the 1st of July and we get 2,500 people turned up, that could be quite difficult. So there's a discussion going on at the moment between the ACT government and the Commonwealth about how exactly we're going to bring people in. So we need an orderly progression of people into the scheme in the ACT. And what I can tell you is based on the experience from the four trial sites that commenced last year, that actually worked very well. So they did it slightly differently in each place. So sometimes it was about ages. So in South Australia, for example, they started with the babies first, bringing in subsequent two to three-year-olds and three to four, then four to five. They're doing six to 13 in the second year and so on. In the Hunter, it was a combination of where you lived. So there are three local government areas involved. So they said, let's go with the Newcastle LGA first. But there are some complicating overlays which had to do with which people are receiving help under which programs there. In Barwon, it was by program only. So they said, all the people who are receiving this support at the moment will transition you over yet. But what I can tell you is it's worked quite well. So we didn't get... There was no right on the 1st of July last year. People knew when they were likely to be coming in. So they'd had a letter saying, you know, this is when you're likely to come in. So the same thing will happen here in the ACT. Probably the next time somebody from the agency comes to talk to a group like this, we'll be able to give you more detail. At the moment, all I can tell you is the phasing, that's how it's referred to, the phasing is still being decided. And so that'll be soonish. Yeah, we're very close to an agreement, which is good. WA also joins on the 1st of July this year. That's going to be very interesting because the WA government is running its own NDIS-like trial. It's called My Way. But we will also be opening in the Perth Hills area of WA on the 1st of July. And in the Northern Territory, we're doing a tiny, tiny number of people in this vast area called the Barclay region. I mean, it's just huge. Peppered with tiny little remote Indigenous communities. So that is going to be quite a challenge. But you can see all of those bits of experience. If you put them all together, what you've got is something that should reflect diversity across the Australian landscape, including how a scheme like this is possibly going to operate in a remote environment. It's going to be very challenging. So the scheme did start on the 1st of July last year. That was so exciting. Our CEO, David Bowen, said, I'd like to stand somewhere just with a balloon that says, NDIS, we are opening on the 1st of July. But in fact, everything that we hoped would happen on the 1st of July did. Things have been going quite well. So this scheme is underpinned by developments that happened probably a year and a half ago, almost now. So there was a Council of Australian Governments Agreement in December 2012. That seemed like an awful long time ago. But that was the foundational general, in principle agreement, all jurisdictions across Australia saying, yes, we need this scheme. And that, of course, came on the back of the Productivity Commission's report saying this is something that Australia needs to move towards now. Bilateral agreements between individual jurisdictions who were hosting a launch site and the Commonwealth Government were signed in April last year. So you can see we're in April now, so it's okay. We haven't quite finished our arrangements for the ACT yet. And for those jurisdictions who have already agreed that they will proceed to full scheme rollout based on the learnings from the trial, so that is at the moment every single jurisdiction in Australia except for WA. So they're the only ones who haven't signed the means of agreement for full scheme rollout. So here in the ACT, in a sense, we'll be ahead of the PAC because we'll get to the end of our trial period, but in fact everybody who needs to access the scheme will have done that. And I've mentioned those other arrangements in place. The one thing I will say is before we opened the doors on the 1st of July in the trial sites last year, we conducted a number of what we called site rehearsals where we actually bought people in, who we suspected might be eligible, kind of ran them through the process. So it was a bit of a dry run to see how it all worked. And that was tremendously instructive. You can construct all your processes and say this is how it's going to work, but until you get real people in there actually doing the processes, you don't find out what could possibly go wrong. And we'll be attempting to do that again this year. So we might, we'll be in touch with you saying, you know, come and give us a run. So I belong to the National Disability Insurance Agency. When we pass the legislation for the scheme, so we are supported by a legislative base that should give all of you some comfort, I think. So most programs are not necessarily supported by legislation. The legislation tells us what we must do in what sort of timeframe for whom and how. And it's supported by other things. So you have the legislation itself, and then underneath the rules, set a, sit a, sit a, sit a, sit a, sit. I'll just put my teeth back in. Sit a set of operational guidelines which are the much more detailed advice to our planners, our local area coordinators, people working with the agency about how this is going to operate and practice. All of that material is available on our website. So all of this is completely transparent. And if any of you are looking for it, you'll find it very easily. If you go to the section called about us, and there's a section called legislation, NDIS rules and so on. So our role, apart from actually delivering the scheme, that is bringing people in, getting them planning, finalizing plans, connecting them to service providers, getting them going, is also about building community awareness of disability. They're much more than fund holders, planners, administrators. So in every launch site, we've got staff whose sole role, sole, I like this phrase because it's French, and I can't speak French, but raison d'etre, isn't that a lovely phrase? I mean reason for being is to actually engage with local communities. So I did that at a national level. I've now transferred to the ACT trial site where I get to do a little bit of it, and it's good, but there is also a director of engagement that's been recently employed who was in the ACT government, so that's a really good link. Her name is Alice Tibbet, so I don't know if any of you know her already, but from now until the end of June and beyond, she'll be out there conducting public forums just like this, and there'll be a series of those as we move towards launch. We obviously have a key role and a key interest in ensuring that we're in the right direction. In a sense, that's everybody's responsibility, but there are people in the agency, as I said, in the actuarial unit whose absolute primary purpose is to make sure that things are running as well as they can. This will be the first time, by the time we get to full scheme rollout, it will be the first time ever in the history of Australia, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this, where we have a single body of data about people with significant and permanent disabilities and the effect or the outcomes of the supports that they're receiving on their lives. So we've started collecting that data then. We have a database that's collecting information about the people, the over 4,000 already who have come into the scheme and who have plans, and we will continue to do this. If any of you read even the executive summary of the Productivity Commission's report, one of the key pieces of feedback they had from people with disabilities, their families and carers was that people hated having to repeat their story over and over and over and over and over and over. So every time somebody went to a new provider, it meant almost inevitably starting from scratch, and people get very tired of that. So with this system, we will collect that information from people once, where they have bodies of information sitting with other providers that they feel we need to have. We can make arrangements to gather that information with people's consent. But once we have it, their story is there, it is captured and then when they come in, say they start off in the ACT and in three years time, that person decides to move to South Australia for example, we will be able to just shift them across, they'll contact the agency, their information is there, they don't have to start from scratch. I mean this is one of the beauties of having something that will be a national scheme. It will be portable in the long term once we've hit full scheme rollout and it will mean that person only needs to tell their story to us just one single time. I will say however, because this is interesting, we heard that information many times even when we were in the lead up to launch, myself and a couple of people from my team went round to each of the launch sites to do some co-design sessions with families and people with disability. And even there they were saying, we get so tired of telling people our stories, but the thing is when people came in for their first planning session they were very keen to tell us their story even if it was only going to be that one time. And maybe it was with the knowledge that having told us just that one time they didn't need to repeat the details again. We will have a very strong role in developing, enhancing the disability sector. Does anybody visit our website at least occasionally, the NDIS website? I'd encourage you to do so, so ndis.gov.au is the address. The reason I'm saying that is information is updated regularly and anything that's new will appear on the carousel so there's this shifting sort of set of headings up to the top right-hand side. Now there have been some capability grants released just recently. The funding has been announced for that. So if any of you are working for a provider who think they might like to have a look at that, that's open for a month so I'd just encourage you to go and have a look at that. It's about building community capacity and capability, about organisations that PAPS might like to set themselves up as a disability service organisation. And we will have a role in undertaking research so we haven't quite commenced, although we have commenced the arrangements for doing a formal evaluation because that's really important but in the longer term the data that's gathered is going to be this very, very rich source of data for researchers both in the short and the long term. So that will be very exciting too. So progress to the end of February so this is pretty well up to date. I don't have much figures because March only finished yesterday. We've had 1,300,000 unique visitors to the website so that means actual individuals which is very good. We get around 2,500,000 visits to the website every single day. More than 5,500 people actually visited our shop fronts, the 7 that are open at the moment. So these are people who didn't have appointments. These were people just coming in seeking information or whatever. More than 7,500 access requests have been submitted so that's the formal mechanism for people to seek access to the scheme and I'll talk a bit about that later. Over 5,000 plans have now been completed so we're moving well towards the target for the first year which is to bring 9,000 people in and have them complete their plans so everybody's expecting we will hit that target. And very comfortably to people who work for the agency, the people who have come in and had their first or second or third planning session with the agency report a very high level of satisfaction with that interaction so we must be doing something right. Now this is a really important slide that's very wordy but I'll talk you through it. This gives you an idea well not an idea it gives you a summary of how things are changing between the current arrangements and how things are going to be in the future and for the ACT that's the very near future which is good. So on the left you've got access criteria in other words this is how people might access either a program or a source of funding or whatever. Under the former system that would vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction so even though you might have two very similar programs side by side the way that people got access to those could vary enormously. You know just this patchwork quilt of arrangements all the way across Australia very confusing and particularly difficult if you had a person moving from one jurisdiction to another. Under the NDIS there is one nationally consistent set of criteria that allows people to access the scheme and it's set out in our legislation and then it's supported by the NDIS rule and then also supported by our operational guidelines. Choice and control under the former system again this varied from state to state as I said you had pockets of people who were receiving individual support packages but that is the exception not the rule and so most people have very little say over the supports they receive. Under the NDIS the individual is at the centre of this scheme absolutely the individual their carers and family sit right at the centre and they are the ones who have control over what they receive and how they receive it. Level of assistance almost always capped even with individual support programs there was often a cap on what people could receive but under this new scheme it's absolutely demand driven and funding well we've already talked about thousands probably of individual programs identified need program a bit of money inflexibility you can only do this to so many people over a period of time that will all be gone now so everything will be demand driven and funding and so we'll have this single funding pool called the NDIS and the more cash we roll into that so once programs come to the end of their life the money that would been devoted to that program will roll into the NDIS and eventually we'll just have a single funding pool for everybody who's able to access the scheme I won't go too much into this but there are principles and objects in the act they're probably worth reading they give effect to Australia's obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and there are some of them there again I won't sort of go into those most of these will be like yeah absolutely nobody will want to argue against them but this is where I wanted to get to so the primary aim of the scheme is to increase participation for people with disability in all spheres of life however that might look for an individual to whatever they can bring to the table you know to the extent that they are able to do it we want to increase their participation is also consistent with our obligations under the UN Convention the scheme design actually assumes that people with disability will participate to the extent that they are able increased economic participation because I'm sure all of you know a number of people with disability who would love to work if only there weren't so many barriers if only they could get the support that they need and desire but increased economic participation for any person always translates to better long-term outcomes and the same is true of people with disability those higher participation rates as soon as you've got people with disability much more visible out there participating in whatever aspect of the community we're talking about eventually that will deal permanently with the social constraints of disability the scheme is going to work very hard to ensure that other supports so beyond the disability specific supports that people need there are a whole host of other supports to which people with disability ought rightly to have access so I'm talking about mainstream supports now transport accommodation health education all of those things everybody has a right to assistance under those schemes anywhere in Australia people with disability often have less access simply because there is either nobody to advocate for them they don't know how to navigate the system or the system says oh it's too hard too hard is not going to be an excuse anymore so that's a big chunk of our work making sure those systems work as well for people with disability as they do for people without and the scheme will fund all of the reasonable and necessary disability supports that a person does need to achieve that participation so when you're thinking about what the intent of a person's plan is that's really what it is it's to increase participation I've talked about some of this already so I'll just recap these are the three pillars that actually underpin the way that this scheme was designed so if you know about these things in your head really a framework for thinking about what this scheme is designed to do so there's the insurance approach which shares the costs of supporting people with disability across the entire community who pays tax okay if you pay tax you are contributing to the scheme it's not like a normal insurance scheme where you're going by a premium in a sense you are all paying your premium through the tax as you pay if any of you were kind of listening to what was happening in the lead up to launch last year there was an amendment made to the Medicare Act which meant that the Medicare levy there's a proportion of the Medicare levy which has gone up and that money is devoted wholly and solely to the NDIS funding so all of us are you know helping to support this in the event that any of us might well need it in the future you just don't know so choice and control I've talked about that I don't need to say that again but that's in the middle and that's in the middle for a very good reason and on the other side is community and mainstream so this sits within a philosophy that says people with disability are as entitled as anyone else to access community and mainstream supports so accessing the scheme this will be a big interest to you so once we know the phasing which is still a mystery to Sarah and I but once we know the phasing the agency will write to and the ACT government may well as well write to people to let them know when they're likely to come into the scheme so they'll have a reasonable expectation about when they're likely to be able to phase into the scheme now you might have a question about what happens to them in the meantime so there is an agreement between all governments who are participating in the trials that existing government programs or continuity of support will continue for people up to the point they actually come in and have a plan so please don't be concerned that if you have people who you are caring for who you think may well be eligible their support will not fall away on the 1st of July so arrangements will stay in place until individuals actually come into the scheme so how do you find out so this is a good question how do you find out whether you're eligible you can go on to our website right now probably Google a lot on your phone if you want to go on to our website right now and there is an electronic very simple form to fill in called My Access Checkup so it's been set up for ACT residents so you can go in have a look at that put in a few questions which really talks about the impact of a person's disability on their daily functioning and at the end of that form which really literally only takes about five minutes to do because I did it for my son who has a permanent disability you will get a little sentence that says it seems like you might be able to access the scheme here's your reference number and it will give you a five digit and so a combination of numbers and letters reference number you need to keep that because that reference number attaches to the information that you have put in the electronic form and it will say please contact us after the first of July so the reason it says that is we don't still know who's actually going to come in on the first of July but nevertheless it's a useful exercise to go through so go on have a try even if you just make up a fictional person or somebody you've worked with in the past you'll get an idea of what that information is seeking but we have a wide gateway so how many of you have had experience in the past with programs that have had all these things that you need all these hoops you have to jump through before you even get to the front door so you have to have a doctor's this and a blah that and a specialist's this and an assessment this you guys actually a part of our front door I don't know whether you knew that but anybody that you're working with that you suspect may be eligible for the scheme you can refer them to the scheme you can sit with them and do the my access checker in your office or in their home if you want to if somebody is even just wanting to chat to somebody to have kind of a preliminary discussion with somebody about what do I do you can do that so you actually are part of our front door and as such because you're in direct contact with people with disability you are going to be very important in the scheme of things so ACT residents oh that says ACT residents ACT anyway and as I said before there will be a gradual intake just an orderly progression to make sure we bring everybody in in a timely way this is the skeleton the sort of core of what the disability requirements are so this is also really important in order for somebody to access the scheme and I'm going to talk just about the ACT now people will need to be aged under 65 so that's really key they'll need to be living residing in the ACT before or on the 1st of July so you can't just move in on the 3rd of July and say I'm here I think you'll find most of your clients are already here anyway you have to have a permanent disability so we'll come back to that in a minute because some of you might be wondering oh what about people with a psychiatric illness where they're sick sometimes and not but I'll talk about that in a minute so a permanent disability and the disability must have a significant impact on the way a person lives their everyday life so I'll use my son as an example because he has a permanent disability he has something called velocardiofacial syndrome you heard of that? no most people haven't so it's a chromosomal disorder but like many of those disorders it's a spectrum disorder and some children are very very significantly impacted others like my son are more at the mild end so his main effect is a mild intellectual disability and he for example has a terrible sense of direction among other things but he does need help with some things I doubt that he's going to be able to access support under the scheme but it is permanent so it needs to have a big impact on your everyday life and your ability to participate and you are going to need supports for the rest of your life we'll talk about early intervention in a minute because it does slightly alter the picture here because you can imagine if somebody has either been newly diagnosed has just had an accident or an injury that's caused what's likely to be a permanent disability by bringing in early intervention immediately you may be able to actually reduce the amount of support that somebody might need over their lifetime so that's got a really important place in this scheme and in fact there are two ways if you like into the scheme there are people who've got a stable permanent disability that has a significant impact they will come in but people who have either been newly diagnosed or have newly acquired a disability can come in under the early intervention requirements I won't go through that so before I just get on to this I want to mention mental illness because mental illness is mental illness can be significant and it can be permanent and perhaps some of you have clients that you help who maybe have a mental illness in the ACT it's an area of particular interest I would say we're interested in helping people where we can certainly they are included in the scheme but you would all be aware that for some significant mental illnesses or psychosocial disabilities it's also called they are episodic so people certainly have a diagnosis that will stay with them for life but they may be ill for periods of time and then they'll have a period of recovery where they are not so ill so can the scheme manage this I'm confident that we can the planning and assessment process is flexible enough so that if a person comes in at a point in their lives where they are so ill but the scheme gets to know them records them at a point where they are ill help could be activated very quickly and if you think about that in terms of other people who might have a progressive or degenerative disability so say motor neurone disease might be a good example so people's needs for support are going to increase over time so there's no cure for that and people generally will get worse over time as persons need increases for disability support they need only contact their planner and make a subsequent appointment and further supports can be arranged the scheme is designed to be that flexible for most people they will have a default review date of about 12 months so this is where their disability is stable they pretty well know what they need etc but if anything happens before that 12 months is up people can just simply phone up that's right so it's designed to be like that so this is the three chunks of the things that you will find in a plan there is a lot of concentration and emphasis on what people's goals are so I don't doubt that if you tried to have a conversation with some of your clients about goals they possibly wouldn't know what you're even talking about because people with disability have had to struggle so hard to get the support that they need and are often making do with much less than they need it's very difficult for people to think beyond next week or next month this is a scheme that's actually encouraging people to think about their long term goals and this is something that people with disability have a bit of trouble getting their heads around so we're not just talking about your needs today or next week or next month what would you like to be doing next year or the year after or in five years so the experience in the four trial sites to date is that this has been the hardest thing for people to tackle it's meant that plan completion rates have taken longer because people have needed time to think about their goals they've sometimes needed assistance to think about their goals what is a goal, well it's something achievable that you want, that's what a goal is but it has to be achievable and it has to be something that you want and so there's been a bit of work going into our trial sites now with people who we know will come into the scheme to actually get them to think about that in a bit more detail and so they're a bit prepared when they come in to have their first planning conversation and there's been a bit of work sponsored by the ACT government around that very thing around helping people to think more carefully about what it is they want to do and we'll continue to do that so with each lot of people who are coming in I don't know how many more of those capacity building workshops Yes so probably a few more to go with that but we'll continue to look on that's right and we'll be looking at needs here in the ACT so again needs have varied across trial sites if you think about the South Australian context where we've had young children coming in first as it turned out that was quite difficult because parents are often dealing with the grief of having a newly diagnosed child there's often a lot of medical intervention that happens in those early days to get the child well and so it wasn't the right time for them to be coming in thinking about their child's long term goals or even to be thinking about a plan they're just dealing with the day to day the second part is the supports that people might already be receiving and these are the informal unpaid supports so supports provided by community by mainstream by families, carers, relatives you know circles of support etc all of those get set out in the plan and then the third part is the actual NDIS funded supports and people will have a budget they'll know exactly what they're up for I won't say much more about this except these are really important you know these are really important it goes back to that point I was trying to make before about this is everybody's responsibility it's not just the NDIA it's everybody's responsibility and in terms of carers because I'm sure many of you will also be connected with families and carers of people with disability they have often borne the brunt of supporting that person often over a lifetime we've got quite a lot of elderly carers in the AC2 who are very concerned about what this scheme is going to mean for their child, their son or daughter and there is a component of the planning where parents can have a separate conversation with the planner so although the intent is always to involve the person with disability in everything nothing about us without us I think is what they say but there obviously will be a place for planners to have a separate conversation with carers or parents if that's appropriate we want to make sure that carers are supported in their role and so while we wouldn't directly fund a carer for X or Y we can put supports in a plan that will make sure that carers get a break from their caring duties that's always been called respite in the past I don't know why that term's necessarily fallen out of favour but nobody seems to like it anymore I mean in many cases it can be a break for the person with disability as well as the parent or carer but those kind of breaks but the other thing it can include is referral to other agencies for support outside the NDIA and it can also include paying for training courses so there obviously will be a place for carers needing to do X or Y to increase their capacity to care for the person and the NDIA so they can pay for that that's not the extent of it you can read about that rule on the NDIS website so learning is going to be absolutely crucial so we like to think of ourselves as a learning organisation learning that's based on experience will absolutely lead to improvement I think that's the only way we can do it we're very open to feedback so at the moment we've got several mechanisms that people can use to give us feedback the trial sites has its own mechanism for receiving feedback from their participants from carers, from family, from the general public as well as us having a national way of collecting that we have a 1-800 number that operates every day of the week except not Saturdays and Sundays sorry I shouldn't tell you that operates every day but I think it's 8 to 8 8am to 8pm to take into account the WA trial sites starting in July you can ring them up and give them feedback there are complaints forms on the website that you can fill in if you've got a complaint and if you've got something nice to say of course we'd like to hear about that too so this is really important for you I'm not sure about the extent to which the ACT will necessarily reflect this experience from our existing trial sites because based on the feedback and the early trends from the first 6 months of operation we've made some adjustments already to our processes and systems to make things easier so clearly expectations about the scheme and what it will deliver are very high and they are high everywhere not just in the disability community but in the community generally I think and this is another area where support workers are going to be just so important so you have direct access to people who are likely to enter the scheme managing people's expectations is going to be really important so by educating yourself about the scheme by knowing that it's permanent disability that has a significant impact that it's about increasing participation it's not about going to the moon it's about increasing participation in the community you will help to manage expectations for scheme participants we've had a lot more access requests come in than we anticipated and the time taken to finalise plans has been longer than expected and that's going back to those complicating factors like in South Australia but mainly it has been around the fact that people have needed much much longer to think about their goals and to unpack their goals and the number of people entering the scheme at least up until the end of December was lower than expected but as I say since then there's been a real pickup in the number of plans being completed and both participants and staff have identified a number of areas where things could have been improved and in fact those improvements have been made so to be successful these are the things that we and I mean collectively we the royal we that's everybody needs to keep in mind those three pillars need to be kept in balance the insurance approach choice and control community and mainstream we need to ensure that the funding for the scheme is sustainable so there's been a funding envelope identified by the time we get to full scheme rollout which is $22 billion a year it's a lot of money you could have a lot of trips to Disneyland for that but it is a lot of money it's about a doubling of what currently goes into the disability sector now so certainly there will be a lot more funding available and that's good news but it also means that we need to keep an eye on making sure we're delivering the scheme within that funding envelope and that's what our scheme actuaries will be doing we need to make sure that the delivery is efficient and effective and again you know in the ACT we might come up against things that we haven't already uncovered in the existing trial sites and be able to make improvements here that means that the process is even more streamlined for people with disability I certainly hope so and it has to improve outcomes it has to if it doesn't we've all failed you know we've all failed so this is what's happened so far there's been a stronger emphasis on the evidence based approach for change we've streamlined the process for determining whether somebody might be able to access the scheme and that's made a big difference there's much better guidance for our decision makers so in terms of who are the decision makers in the agency about what a person gets and so on it's our planners so we have people who have the delegated authority from the CEO to make decisions about what somebody can have in their plan much better communication I hope with the community so that they understand what reasonable and necessary means and we're streamlining our admin and plan implementation to reduce the burden on the JAA staff we're building sector capacity I won't go into all of this you can find it on the website we ran a round called practical design fund at the beginning I think of end of 2012 and all of the projects that have been finalised you can find them on the website if you're interested to see what they came up with we had a conference last year that's old news, god nearly a year ago and sector development fund and this is where the capacity building grants come in so I mentioned them earlier worth going on the website to have a look at those and transition will be gradual so there'll be this gradual transition I'm not exactly sure how it's almost like a magic box at the moment but just reassure you next time we come back we'll be able to tell you all about that wide gateway so I mentioned the web the call centre the 1-800 number the shopfront anybody can turn up to a regional shopfront at any time so once the doors open on the 1st of July here you're very welcome just to come in and visit us there are information products being developed now for our ACT audiences and we don't just print them in hard copy everything also goes up on the web so if you were ever looking for a copy of something you could just go to the web and print one off from there we'll have products going out to our prospective participants once our phasing is known and we are working on a planning kit and a plan implementation kit for people who become participants in the scheme there's still quite a bit of work to do I try not to think about it just get through today it'll be fine but as I said before there'll be a continual rolling program of community engagement so just look out for that again it'll all be on the website the schedules if any of you are signed up to the newsletter so it's free an electronic newsletter if you haven't go to our website and sign up for that there'll be a gradual movement of national office staff from Canberra to Geelong by the end of June so obviously the ACT trial site staff are staying here because we need to be on the ground but almost everybody else is going to national office in Geelong we're preparing for that formal evaluation an external independently conducted evaluation of the scheme that will be starting soon and this is part of our preparation of people and organisations in the ACT for 2014 and that's probably as much as I wanted to say I could keep going but you know you might have some questions