Thank you for your time in advocating for OT in the NDIS and private practice area.
It is already very difficult to recruit experienced staff and current staff are wanting high levels of pay to make their time and stress of working with the NDIS more manageable. To recruit staff we need to maintain the current pay rate for all services not dependent on severity. The current proposal will make running a business not viable. There are already high costs of running a business including; admin staff, therapy assistants that support therapy session preparation, rent, insurance and electricity and these costs are increasing. The proposed changes will lead to more large scale businesses and less small private practices that will reduce choice for consumers of NDIS.
Children with lower severity make great progress with an intensive program so they can hopefully not need NDIS in the future. The prosed pricing changes could result in providers prioritising more severe clients leading to a shortage of services for families. Impacting on their stress in a time of need.
I do think there could be more work around caping on fees for reports and reviews due to the current large variability between services and providers.
Another cost saving option would be to investigate the process of purchasing equipment. It would be good to have a different program where instead of purchasing equipment new every time, that they instead can be on loan to ensure they are suitable and also having a program that supports the selling of second hand equipment rather than families selling them on Market Place.
Thank you for your time in advocating for OT in the NDIS and private practice area.
It is already very difficult to recruit experienced staff and current staff are wanting high levels of pay to make their time and stress of working with the NDIS more manageable. To recruit staff we need to maintain the current pay rate for all services not dependent on severity. The current proposal will make running a business not viable. There are already high costs of running a business including; admin staff, therapy assistants that support therapy session preparation, rent, insurance and electricity and these costs are increasing. The proposed changes will lead to more large scale businesses and less small private practices that will reduce choice for consumers of NDIS.
Children with lower severity make great progress with an intensive program so they can hopefully not need NDIS in the future. The prosed pricing changes could result in providers prioritising more severe clients leading to a shortage of services for families. Impacting on their stress in a time of need.
I do think there could be more work around caping on fees for reports and reviews due to the current large variability between services and providers.
Another cost saving option would be to investigate the process of purchasing equipment. It would be good to have a different program where instead of purchasing equipment new every time, that they instead can be on loan to ensure they are suitable and also having a program that supports the selling of second hand equipment rather than families selling them on Market Place.