Sarah’s lived experience has allowed her to truly understand the journey that both professionals and loved ones go through when supporting someone with disability from diagnosis and beyond, especially the challenges and benefits of navigating disability support services and the NDIS. 

Over the years, Sarah and our experienced care team have noticed an increase of unregistered providers in the disability sector. It has been reported that 40% of NDIS spending goes to unregistered providers. We ask Sarah about the pros and cons of using unregistered providers and independent support workers for care services.

Sarah admits that she does use unregistered independent support workers as her young child has limited funding for support workers. She points out that they are less expensive to use than a registered service provider. However, if they call in sick then she has no back up options available which can make things difficult with forward planning.

However, the main issue she explains with using unregistered providers is that they are not routinely checked through regular audits to ensure they are following legislation governed under the NDIS. Sarah highlights she tries to check some things herself with her knowledge, but she understands that not all parents have the experience to do the quality checks themselves.

Moreover, independent support workers and unregistered providers do not all pay for public liability and superannuation as it is costly. Public liability is very expensive to pay for and the clients can be at risk to cover the costs if an incident occurs during a shift.

Finally, unregistered providers and workers lack professional training and don’t have to follow quality standards. For example, many support workers don’t know they should not lift a client directly themselves off the floor after a fall. This is because there are quality safety standards in place to prevent support workers from injuring themselves during a shift. Sarah explains that many unregistered providers out there don’t have the training and necessary experience to protect both the clients and support workers themselves.

The reason why clients choose registered providers is for the extra peace of mind that they are following quality care provisions, audit checks, government safety standards and have the proper insurance coverage, training and superannuation contributions in place.

What makes DisabilityCo different than other registered providers is that they take the time getting to know clients regarding their care requirements and goals. Sarah says,