NDIS Pricing and Advertising

In this episode of the Community Therapy Podcast, Scott Lynch discusses recent developments in the NDIS and Aged Care sectors, focusing on NDIS pricing reforms led by IHACPA and the ACCC's warnings regarding misleading advertising practices. The episode aims to provide listeners with concise updates on industry news and highlights the importance of pricing parity and ethical advertising in supporting participants effectively.

Takeaways

• NDIS pricing is currently managed by the NDIA.
• IHACPA is tasked with exploring future NDIS pricing reforms.
• Pricing harmonization is crucial for workforce stability.
• Misleading advertising can harm NDIS participants.
• ACCC is actively investigating problematic advertising practices.
• Community Therapy offers valuable online training courses - learn more here

Transcript

0:01

In this episode we talk about NDIS pricing and NDIS advertising. Welcome to the Community Therapy Podcast. My name is Scott Lynch, founder and managing director at Community Therapy. In this episode, we're trying something a little bit different and introducing a weekly bite-sized Aged Care and NDIS industry news wrap-up. We already do this via a weekly LinkedIn newsletter that has over 2,500 subscribers at the time of recording, is the 30th of December. Before we jump into some industry news, a quick sorry for the start of the episode to our communications officer, Harry, who is currently on holidays as I've used completely different introduction music to make sure that I get this episode out this week and we can return to normal music from next week. In this week's news, we've focused primarily on NDIS industry news due to not a large amount of aged care news across the previous week to report on to everybody. Across the NDIS, I wanted to draw attention to two pieces of information or news, the first being NDIS pricing. Up until this date, the NDIA, National Disability Insurance Agency has been responsible for NDIS pricing and setting the pricing arrangements and price limits each financial year. And that is still the case moving forwards. However, the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, IHACPA, has been tasked by the government to undertake initial work to identify opportunities for future reforms to NDIS pricing. If you don't already know, IHACPA currently prices for hospitals, residential aged care, and now community aged care with support at home reforms and is very well placed to undertake this work and I was very pleased to see this. Over the next 12 months, IHACPA will identify principles to guide a new pricing. framework, explore pricing model options to improve NDIS pricing and this point I was very happy to read was within IHACPA scope. Look for opportunities for pricing harmonization across the care and support sector. The reason I was happy to read this point around price harmonization is if you have one funding model, let's say support at home, in community aged care priced differently to another NDIS when the workforce is shared or arguably the same in terms of skills and makeup. You will start to set in place movements of the workforce from one part, one funding scheme to the other. that are unintended. And the reason that that is a problem is that it disrupts continuity of support for consumers and participants. If a organization, a business isn't confident of being able to be sustainable in a particular funding scheme where they derive the main source of their business income from. they will look to diversify or completely change and leave a funding scheme. And those that lose out the most from that dynamic are consumers, participants, people receiving the support. The best thing that can be done here from a pricing arrangements perspective across support at home and the NDIS is pricing parity. And IHACPA is the best place to provide that advice in my humble opinion. So I take that news of IHACPA being tasked by the government to look into NDIS pricing as a very positive thing for the whole sector, participants and providers. The next point is in the news was that I wanted to draw attention to was information released or notice to providers released by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, ACCC. It's released a notice to businesses about being cautious around problematic advertising practices that target participants in the NDIS and putting businesses on notice that they are actively investigating and will follow up. concerns in these areas. They have given examples on their website of what constitutes false or misleading advertising with examples such as using the words NDIS approved, advertising suggesting that NDIS funds will cover particular things like all-inclusive holidays when general costs associated with holidays are not covered by NDIS funding. advertising instructions on how to use funding codes to cover certain things that may not be covered and advertising that suggests the business is affiliated or endorsed by the NDIS by using NDIS in its business name or in its description of services such as NDIS therapies. So those were the two pieces of NDIS news that I wanted to draw attention to in today's sized episode of industry news. Each week moving forward, there'll be news either about Aged Care or NDIS or both. And we'll try and keep those episodes under 10 minutes. If you haven't already, you can make sure that you subscribe to our podcast and so that you get weekly alerts of when we do these industry wrap ups. And we always like to add more value as well at community therapy and what we're finding that our network, our aged care partner organizations, NDIS partner organizations are finding a lot of value from Australia wide is our online training courses. In particular, our industry leading manual handling training courses, which to date is nearing over 40,000. support workers nationally having completed or in the progress process of completing our training, which we are very proud of. To see that you can go to communitytherapy.com.au slash courses and search for our manual handling courses that can be completed on our website or via custom SCORM packages embedded within organizations learning management systems. That's all for today's episode. I'll see you in the next one.