WA Delays Transition to NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission – Why this is Bad for Participants

Transition Delayed to 1 December 2020

Western Australia announced yesterday that they were delaying the transition to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

Reason Given is for Dealing with COVID-19.  3 Active Cases in whole of WA

WA has zero cases in hospitals or aged care and has 3 Active Cases in the entire state. This makes no sense.  The transition date has been known for a long time and providers should have been ready.

All of the quality providers we have met in WA were ready to transition and already had great systems and compliance in place prior.  All the delay does is extend the life of those providers who have poor systems and compliance and have little chance of passing an NDIS QSC Audit.

This is Bad for Some Participants.

The compliance obligations of the NDIS QSC are enormous compared to the former NDIA and state based regimes.  We know of participants living in SDA housing where the owners of the houses have been made the NDIS SDA Provider yet the ones we spoke to were not even aware of the policies or procedures they had used to apply for registration, let alone about how to comply with them.  There are trades and services people going into SDA properties with no safety checks, no inductions, no training, nothing.

Great Providers were Ready and have been Compliant for Years

As above, all of the great providers were ready and had outstanding compliance and quality control systems in place for a long time prior.  Unless we are missing something it just looks like those providers with poor compliance systems have been given an extra 6 months.  We hope it doesn’t result in any harm coming to participants