The Alliance is seeing a growing number of NDIS participants lose their eligibility for the NDIS when they enter a nursing home for the first time after they turn 65.

This is because S29 of the NDIS Act revokes NDIS eligibility status for scheme participants in this position.

Losing NDIS eligibility and access to the scheme’s funding means that these disabled Australians are forced to rely on an aged care system that was never intended to support them.

Without the NDIS, these former NDIS participants have lost any chance of leaving aged care. They can’t

• Access NDIS Specialist Disability Accommodation housing
• Get NDIS funding. The aged care system doesn’t provide as much funding as the NDIS does
• Obtain customised equipment. State equipment schemes don’t provide equipment to nursing home residents and aged care providers don’t have to provide customised equipment
• Access rehabilitation
• Access the community
• Obtain transport funding
• Maintain connections with vital health and other services
• Leave the nursing home.

The Alliance is making another submission to the Aged Care Royal Commission about this devastating situation and would like to hear from NDIS participants who have found themselves in this position.

At its recent Melbourne hearings on YPINH, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety accepted the Alliance’s call for no more younger Australians to enter nursing homes by the start of 2022; and no younger people to remain in residential aged care by 2025.

Alliance National Director, Dr Bronwyn Morkham explains in the video, below:

In an article for the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR), the Alliance’s National Director, Dr Bronwyn Morkham, calls for an integrated healthcare system for Australia.

The Living Longer Living Better aged care reforms that focus on keeping older people at home for longer; and the arrival of the NDIS with its focus on improved social and economic participation for its members, means the demand for new and improved community health responses is only going to get greater. Both reforms offer an exciting opportunity for health networks to think differently about delivery of existing services outside hospital walls; and how, in collaboration with other programs, new health responses can be developed to the mutual benefit of all.

ASMR Newsletter – October 2016

With over half of the young people placed in nursing homes acquiring their disability as the result of a catastrophic injury, the Alliance has argued for development of a national catastrophic injury insurance scheme since its inception in 2002.

In 2007, a National Summit convened by the Alliance and attended by senior representatives from the AMA, motor vehicle and work cover schemes and state health and disability departments, unanimously called for the development of such a scheme as a matter of urgency.

The Productivity Commission called for two Schemes in its 2011 Report into Life Time Care for Australians with disability. While the NDIS is now underway, much remains to be done to ensure the NIIS can similarly become a reality.

The Alliance made a substantial submission to the NIIS RIS regarding consolidation of Australian motor vehicle schemes to no fault status.