Australia has long struggled with an uneven distribution of primary health care services. Urban residents experience greater access to primary health care, despite the fact that rural and remote residents generally experience poorer health than their urban counterparts.
The Australian landscape for disability services is undergoing dramatic change. This service system is moving from the government funding of NGOs to deliver services; to government providing funding directly to disabled Australians, who will then have complete choice and control over their own care options.
There are many communities across Australia, particularly in remote areas, where services were not readily available for people with disabilities. This was particularly prevalent in small rural and discrete remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was launched by the government in July 2013 to address an urgent need to reform of disability services in Australia. The NDIS is a new way of providing individualised support for eligible people with permanent and significant disability, their families and carers.1 The Department of Communities wanted to help people particularly in remote areas to take advantage of this new model.
The Toolkit contains a series of brochures, checklists, tools and frameworks designed to provide system participants with information to increase their readiness for this system change; and to enable them to become active, informed participants in the NDIS.
PwC’s Indigenous Consulting (PIC) is a new, national Indigenous consulting business that is 49% owned by the PwC Australia Firm, and 51% owned by Indigenous Australians. The unique power of PIC is the combination of Indigenous expertise, experience and knowledge, with PwC’s world-leading consulting capability.
PwC/PIC were asked to consult across six communities to establish what support already existed for people with a disability; what the challenges and barriers to receiving services currently were; and what they would be under the new NDIS model.
We were also tasked to develop a Toolkit to support these communities to build capacity, using non-conventional disability services.
The impact of our work has been to: