Review Meetings

Does a report provide enough detail or does the information need to be tailored to the person doing the review? If so, is a report sufficient or is a report plus attendance at the review meeting a way of translating the reports details for that particular staff member. Being able to prioritise the information in the reports in a way that answers the questions of the staff member completing the NDIS review enables the therapist to more quickly link information together in a way that the need to read through a report that has a succession of paragraphs does not provide. NDIS has been looking at standardising the reports to provide an ease of pathway of this information for the review staff through use of simple topic limited assessments. These can provide an overall understanding for comparison across diagnoses but do not provide specifics to help justify the incremental differences in funding that are necessary between one client to another. Modifying the formatting of each report is necessary to show progress, to justify clinically why certain areas within the ‘whole’ of every day life are important for ‘this’ client as compared to another one. Use of a variety of assessment tools can support speed of completion of the reports whilst providing sufficient detail. It is however, from experience, NDIS staff members own professional / personal experience at the graded levels which seem to be more taken into account rather than clinical justification. One of the bigger picture issues is that the entire NDIS system needs to be sustainable for Australia as a population. Hence, efficiency needs to be looked at across all areas. Efficiency however needs to include sufficient detail to still be the most optimal clinical service provision outcome wise and sustainable for staff.