NDIS and the lived experience of psychosocial disability for people presenting to the emergency department (ED) (In Progress)

Mind Australia and the University of South Australia have partnered on a PhD research project where Mind is sponsoring Heather McIntyre, a Lived Experience research candidate, in her PhD. Heather’s project is titled “NDIS and the lived experience of psychosocial disability for people presenting to the emergency department (ED): A mixed methods co-enquiry study”. 

The research found that NDIS participants often receive inadequate care within emergency departments, and they are discharged from emergency departments without proper treatment due to a major disconnect with the NDIS. Emergency departments and NDIS providers must acquire further skills and service capacities to provide supportive, overlapping care and decrease distress for people with psychosocial disabilities. The voices of people with a psychosocial disability with an NDIS plan are clear that emergency departments must learn how to build trust, how to really listen and provide safe, low-sensory environments. 

Read more about the research project findings in peer-reviewed publications here:

Exploring the personal, programmatic and market barriers to choice in the NDIS for people with psychosocial disability (2022)

Mind Australia, in partnership with Deakin University, interviewed 22 individuals with psychosocial disability who are recipients of individual funding packages in three National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) trial sites across Australia. This research involved examining the policy and assumptions of choice under the NDIS, as well as the experience of undertaking choice through individualised funding arrangements which position people with psychosocial disability as consumers in a market-place of service provision. 

The findings demonstrate that choice is an ongoing activity and that at every stage personal, programmatic and market barriers impact individuals capacity to maximise choice. The intent of Government policy to provide choice to individual funding recipients based on an optimally functioning market-place with empowered self-actualizing individuals, collides with a complex reality where barriers abound at every stage of the choice-making process. Enhancing choice-making of people with psychosocial disability within the NDIS requires governments and services to explicitly address the personal, programmatic and market-based barriers to choice.

Understanding people with psychosocial disability as choice-makers in the context of the NDIS (2018)

Choice and control are central to the design of the NDIS. However, the application of choice for people with psychosocial disability remains largely unexamined in the empirical literature. This study explores how people with psychosocial disability make choices in the context of the NDIS, the supports they draw on, and their understandings of themselves as choice-makers.

Choice was considered to be essential by the 22 NDIS participants interviewed for this research. They regarded it as central to providing their ability to voice what was important to them, their sense of self, their autonomy and their right to make decisions in their lives. Choice is also not an automatically positive, or even neutral, experience and is affected by a variety of factors both personal and within the social and policy contexts. The research indicates that for people with

psychosocial disability there are many barriers to choice to be overcome, and indeed that this set of barriers becomes the context in which they are required to undertake the labour of choice. 

Effective, evidence-based psychosocial interventions suitable for early intervention in the NDIS: promoting psychosocial functioning and recovery (2016)

This report brings together evidence about early interventions that can significantly help people with a psychosocial disability (mental health concerns) participate socially and economically. Its findings are a resource for people in this situation, their families and carers and for National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) staff involved in local area coordination and the provision of support services.

This literature review suggests that the NDIA should examine the areas of Family Psychoeducation and Support, Social Skills, Illness Self-Management, Peer Support and consumer networks as potentially valuable and effective early interventions. It also recommends that support plans should facilitate access to Supported Employment and Education services, Cognitive Remediation, Outreach Treatment and Support Services, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for psychosis, Supported Housing and physical health management programs.

Implications for family carers when people with psychosocial disability have individualised funding packages – literature review (2015)

A literature review that examines the impact of individualised funding on family and carers of people with a psychosocial disability. Individualised funding is becoming the dominant funding mechanism in disability and aged services under the NDIS. 

This literature review found that the design of individualised funding programs determines the impact on family carers. The carers, and their family member, have more positive outcomes compared to traditional agency-controlled services when conditions are conducive. The conditions required to achieve these positive outcomes are access to information, support to match the level of administrative responsibility carers are expected to carry, adequate funds, and access to supports and services.

People making choices: the support needs of people with a psychosocial disability (2014) 

A research project that asks 41 people with psychosocial disability what they want in terms of services and supports, how they would make these decisions, and what, if anything would assist them to do this. 

People with psychosocial disability in this project prioritised health, economic security, social connection, housing & personal relationships in achieving a good life. They valued having a skilled support person plus peer & family support. Barriers included poverty, stigma and discrimination.