Page 5793 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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Recommendation 9 was in reference to continuing to support Tandem’s provision of weekend respite. Again, this is one of those areas where there has been some reduction, and there is an issue around the adequacy of funding for this sort of respite. Obviously weekend respite is more intensive and requires additional resources in terms of basic things such as pay for workers. But this is key in terms of ensuring that people are able to continue their caring role but also to enable parents who may have other children to provide them with attention as well. Siblings will often suffer in terms of caring relationships as well. Again, it is essential that we provide adequately funded and appropriate weekend respite for people.
The issue mentioned in recommendation 12 about having flexible respite options is something which really came out through the inquiry. Respite has to be flexible and it should not be limited to just one or two options. What is going to be suitable for one family or one carer is not going to be suitable for another, and we need to keep this in mind. This is in relation to various things, such as overnight respite. Some families are going to find it suitable to go to a respite house, while other people prefer to have that help in home. That is particularly the case for older carers who might be ageing and who are worried about what is going to happen to the people they care for if something occurs to them. It is about providing support which can enable the people they care for to become more independent and be used to being at home without the carer. That is why having those flexible options is essential in this whole issue about respite.
Another issue Mr Doszpot mentioned was service standards. One thing which came out through this whole process was that there are concerns around the standards applied to various respite services and also the auditing process which is undertaken. We need to provide adequate resourcing to make sure that services are audited frequently. At the moment, auditing is very infrequent. In some cases, they may not be audited in a space of five years or so. We need to make sure that this is far more adequate. We must ensure that we support the services to establish standards.
Recommendation 20 is that the committee recommends the ACT government work with the disability sector to establish a minimum mandatory qualification for all paid disability support workers in government and non-government services and develop a framework to ensure that all volunteers are appropriately trained.
That goes to the standard of services that are being provided and making sure that workers are appropriately trained, that they know what sort of conditions they will have to deal with and that they are able to deal with people who will have very complex conditions. This is extremely important in terms of the sorts of services and the quality of services we are providing to families.
Recommendation 27 is about ensuring that the no-wrong-door policy which is being applied by DHCS is appropriately planned and fully resourced so that we do not end up with the same situation for families where they find they still have to go to various services to access the services they need. We want to make sure that this actually works. Some concerns were expressed by a number of providers, so we want to make sure that they are accounted for and that any concerns that arise through the process are dealt with.
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