Disability Support Services Announcements Reflect Consultation Findings

At the start of this year, a significant piece of work for our team was supporting Disability Support Services on their nationwide consultation. 

Disability Support Services is critical in the lives of our team, and so, we know closely the importance of a sustainable system and a system that listens to its users, and enables them.

We took incredibly seriously, our role in supporting people to be heard and supporting the DSS team to deliver their mandate. The decisions announced recently by the Minister for Disability Issues mark the end of this important first phase, and the decisions made reflect the major themes of what we heard and understood from communities across the country. 

People wanted: Geographic and system inconsistency addressed, a system-wide mechanism for personalisation, the voice of family and caregivers involved more robustly, while balanced with the voice of disabled people, reassessment when circumstances change and the removal of rules that limited flexibility, while giving people the clarity of a budget. 

We are pleased to see the consultation has directly impacted the decisions made. It makes the airline losing our wheelchairs while on the way to Nelson almost worth it! 

We’re incredibly grateful to have been a part of this work and trusted with it, and we acknowledge the internal DSS team for their work, and support. I am so proud of our team, who did a huge amount of unseen work, and took every story we heard seriously, and reported it back as told to us, so that it could impact the process. 

More work is always going to be needed for our community, and this is the first step, not the end. It’s a real privilege to support work like this, because this work impacts our lives; it is not just our profession. We want people to hold us to account in all the work we do, so that it does its best to reflect an appropriately balanced view of the community's needs and the systems. 

Any level of cautiousness felt is completely understandable, because that’s true to our community’s life-long experiences, and there is still work to be done, but it is incredibly positive that the decisions made at the end of this phase can be directly linked to the consultation.