Page 1447 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013

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opportunity that presents to us is to take feedback from parents like you, Mrs Jones, around things that would make stays in the emergency department easier for parents when they are caring for their children.

One of the other things I learned from some of the staff that provided me with advice on that trip is to use the parents in terms of record keeping of their children. That is something they are doing at the children’s hospitals in Sydney where the parents become the owner of the record of the child’s visit to hospital because they are the ones primarily who stay with the child for the whole time of their trip. We are looking at ways to involve that in the model of care to make sure that, as nurses and doctors come and go, we actually use the skills and expertise of parents to make sure that all of the information around that visit and, indeed, previous visits, is able to be at the fingertips and that we use the parents’ expertise in that. That will be part of the work that is done as well.

Disability services—funding

MRS JONES: My question is to the Minister for Disability, Children and Young People. Minister, in the pre-election budget update, the Treasury report stated in relation to the trial of the NDIS:

A provision of $3.7 million per annum has been included in the Pre-election Budget Update estimates.

Further, in relation to the full rollout of the NDIS, it stated:

The additional cost to the ACT Government for the full roll-out of NDIS to the ACT population has an estimated annual recurrent cost of around $40 million in 2015-16.

Minister, are these estimates still current? If not, what are the current new estimates?

MS BURCH: I thank the member for her question. The commitment we have put in for this year is in the work that we are doing in the lead-up to 2014, so it will make reference. There is also a commonwealth contribution into that. So let us be clear that, whilst we are committing, so is the commonwealth committing additional funds into the NDIS.

Our current disability budget is a bit over $80 million, and this is on top of that funding. Also in addition to that, and I will come back to some other elements of your question, Mrs Jones, the commonwealth has committed $12 million in transition over the next three years for the community sector to help them to change their practice and to be prepared for the quite significant fundamental changes through the NDIS.

In short, I have nothing in front of me at the moment that would indicate that any change is needed to be made to the Treasurer’s midyear update. We are still going through negotiations with the commonwealth around what this means for us. As you are aware, we are starting NDIS here in the ACT in July next year. There is an expectation that between 2014 and 2016 and beyond there will move between 2½ thousand people and 5,000 people through that. There will be significant additional commonwealth dollars, and our dollars, into that.


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