NDIS: What is Support Coordination?
Support Coordination is basically a bucket of funding to help you find and coordinate services and start implementing your NDIS plan. It’s what gets you through the, “OK, I’ve got this money…now what!?” phase.Basically, your Support Coordinator should be like a partner to help you to ‘bring your plan to life’. There’s a lot of confusion about what Support Coordination is and isn’t so here are a few tips and facts you might find useful.
Support Coordination can be used to help you:
- Get started using your NDIS funds
- Understand your plan and its budgets
- Find and connecting with supports and services in your community to achieve the goals in your plan
- Increase your ability and capacity to independently manage your plan in the future
Support Coordination is NOT:
- Financial management of your plan funds (that’s called plan management)
- Advocacy
- To make decisions or control things for you
- Just handing you a list of possible service providers (so don’t let someone do that to you!)
The official definition of Supports Coordination by the NDIA is ‘Assistance to strengthen participants abilities to coordinate and implement supports and participate more fully in the community. It can include initial assistance with linking participants with the right providers to meet their needs, assistance to source providers, coordinating a range of supports both funded and mainstream and building on informal supports, resolving points of crisis, parenting training and developing participant resilience in their own network and community.’
Important things to know:
- If you are NDIA managed then you can usually request Support Coordination, especially in your first plan when you are still learning how NDIS works and how to make it work for you and your family.
- If you are self-managed you cannot have Support Coordination as part of your plan.
- If you use a plan manager (who manages your plan finances) you can have Support Coordination but your plan manager cannot do this for you.
- At present they must also be a person or provider who is registered by the NDIA to provide this service.
- Therapy Alliance Group have qualified Support Coordinators and are registered service providers with NDIS to provide Support Coordination.
The team at Therapy Alliance Group focus on Service Coordination primarily for children aged 0-12 years who are NDIS participants as we have identified this is an area we have particular expertise in. We often refer older clients on to other Service Coordinators who are better able to link them with mainstream community supports as needed. Not sure if you need or are eligible for Support Coordination? Just give our Toowoomba clinic a call on 1300 66 1945 or shoot us an email at team@tagclinic.com.au and one of our helpful team will answer your questions and get you in touch with who you need to speak to.
– by Rachel Tosh
Rachel Tosh
Speech Pathologist
Rachel is a Certified Practicing Speech Pathologist (CPSP) with a wide variety of clinical experience in inpatient and outpatient paediatric care in both Australia and the UK which enables her to translate theory into real life application across diverse clinical contexts. Her latest adventure, Speech Parent is changing the face of paediatric speech pathology internationally by empowering and educating parents of children with communication and feeding difficulties. She describes herself as a recovering work-a-holic (we all know she isn’t actually recovering – seriously who else sends emails at 4:30am!?). Rachel is passionate about: business leadership; literacy and feeding difficulties; educating and empowering others; and optimising therapy outcomes. Although these interests may seem diverse, the recurring theme through them all is a love for facilitating growth and development in others so they can achieve their own unique potential. Things I like: “Lamb roast, reading, helping others and creating systems that work…I may or may not enjoy these together!” Things I don’t like: “People not respecting each other and children missing out because of bad care or broken systems.” Favourite colour: “Can I have the whole rainbow?” How the TAG team describe Rachel: “Passionate”; “Hard working”; “Creative”.
“Be there for others but never leave yourself behind” -Dodinski