Page 1172 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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One of the things we saw as we made the transition to the NDIS was funding transition to the NDIS for a range of community-based mental health and psychosocial disability support services and the difficulty that those services had transitioning their model to an individualised funding model.
We have seen some changes in some of the services available. We did, of course, welcome in March the commonwealth government announcement of a $121.9 million investment in primary health networks to provide an additional 12 months of support for clients of commonwealth community mental health programs, including personal helpers and mentors and partners in recovery, and support for day-to-day living in the community. That is a recognition by the commonwealth that their agency, the National Disability Insurance Agency, has not adequately addressed the shortcomings that we have seen in the support that had been provided for people with psychosocial disability and the difficulty that both participants and providers have had in transitioning to the NDIS model.
As I said, the ACT government and the Office for Disability are leading the national work on the mental health interface. We take this issue very seriously.
Disability services—specialist accommodation
MS LAWDER: My question is to the Minister for Disability. Minister, how many people in the ACT qualify for specialist disability accommodation?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I will take that question on notice.
MS LAWDER: Minister, how many specialist disability accommodation places are there in the ACT as at today’s date?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I will take that question on notice.
MS LEE: Minister, what are you doing as the responsible minister to ensure that the ACT has sufficient specialist disability accommodation to meet current and future demands?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: This actually refers to a topic that is of great interest to me. Ms Lee may be aware that late last year the Office for Disability hosted the having a home forum. Specifically at my request they put together a full-day forum to ensure that families and people with disability in the ACT and providers and developers could come together with the National Disability Insurance Agency experts around supported disability accommodation, SDA, and talk about how SDA can support the greater provision of appropriate accommodation for people with disability in the ACT market. This is an area where the ACT has been slow to pick up the support for SDA and it is something that I have been concerned about for some time.
So I initiated that having a home forum which was extremely popular with people with disability and their families as well as potential providers of SDA accommodation in the ACT who were able to speak with people from other
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