3/03/25 - Aged Care & NDIS Update

Welcome to the Aged Care & NDIS Update!

This edition covers:

• NDIS – are NDIS reports actually being read?
• Aged Care Act – updates have been released by the Department
• Aged Care Worker Screening – proposed changes

For more details, check out our LinkedIn newsletter.

Want to know more about Community Therapy?

• Allied Health 👉 We provide allied health services on the Central Coast and Hunter of NSW across the Aged Care, NDIA and Hospital at Home sectors - Make a referral
• Manual Handling 👉 We are experts in manual handling training and have industry leading online modules - Learn more

Transcript

0:01

Hello and welcome to the Community Therapy Aged Care and NDIS update where we deliver the latest news and insights from the past week to help keep aged care and NDIS professionals just like you informed and empowered. My name is Scott Lynch, founder and managing director at Community Therapy and in this episode we talk about NDIS, are the NDIS reports actually being read? and updates across the New Aged Care Act. First things first, you may have seen in the news and across social media, some videos going around from the NDIA CEO, Rebecca Falkingham, after recently speaking in front of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee. Liberal Senator Holly Hughes posed a question to Rebecca Falkingham. Are the support needs assessments in the workforce and the $280 million going to remove the need for participants and their families to spend so much money getting reports? Mrs. Falkingham made several statements which have garnered significant attention. including one being my staff can't read 280 page reports. However, she did go on to clarify to be really clear about it. Often those reports are not things we can consider under the Act. Overall, these statements from my personal opinion are disappointing. Primarily because people living with disability have had quite a terrible history and experience with conversations and media attention around independent assessments, support needs assessments and any other word for these types of assessments. So making comments like we can't read 280 page reports in my opinion is just not the right way to go about change management. To be clear, however, in the aged care landscape, we do have support needs assessments completed by an independent workforce across aged care assessors. Transitioning the NDIS however to this is significant change management due to the history of the scheme and failed attempts so far. Therefore, language around this change management is important, both for respect to people living with disability, as well to all of the amazing providers and professionals. providing support to people living with disabilities. If you want to watch a short clip from the hearing, we'll post that in the show notes. Age care update, if you haven't kept up across things, across the age care landscape, the change going on in community age care, as well as residential age care is significant, to say the least. The aged care rules are being released in stages because there are such significant changes and stage 2C has recently been released which contains topics relating to the aged care act chapters four and six in particular the grantee code of conduct, register of banning orders and non recovery of recoverable amounts. I won't go further into those in this podcast, however, we'll provide links in the show notes. A plain language fact sheet has also been released by the Department of Health and Aged Care, which summarises what rights older adults have when accessing aged care services under the new Aged Care Act. And further progress has been made around aged care worker screening. Overall, the government continues to work towards the introduction of requirements for aged care worker screening to align with the NDIS. This will mean more robust screening checks for the aged care sector, with the intention of an aged care worker screening check being recognised in the NDIS sector and vice versa. That is very positive news. We know that many organisations work across both sectors and straddling two compliance areas is challenging above on top of everything else that we need to do. It does make sense to streamline what compliance components we can. That's all in today's episode. Look forward to seeing you in the next one and If you need to learn or want to learn more about community therapy, you can jump onto our website, communitytherapy.com.au. For organizations across the Central Coast and Hunter New England Health District, we provide multidisciplinary allied health services with a workforce of almost over 140 amazing human beings now supporting people to live enriched and meaningful lives in our community. from children all the way through to older adults in the community and living within residential aged care. And for organisations all around Australia, we have an amazing online training platform with our most popular online manual handling training suite of products where you can access those via our website or we can develop custom packages to embed within your learning management system. Have a wonderful week and I will see you in the next episode.