Stranded hospitalised NDIS participants to reside in former aged care facility

There are currently 127 patients in South Australian public hospital beds who are eligible for NDIS support services and are ready to leave hospital, but have remained there.

The new 24-bed community care facility cost $1.2 million to open at the former Uniting SA’s Regency Green aged care home site in Regency Park, South Australia, as the State’s hospitals continue to face extraordinary pressure.

State Health Minister Chris Picton told ABC News the new facility will provide transitional care to NDIS patients with a psychosocial disability while they receive mental health support.

“It’s going to give a much more peaceful and calming environment for [these people with disability], the appropriate care that’s going to be provided by CLO (Community Living Options) but also making sure we are freeing up those beds,” says Minister Picton.

“These are people who it has been difficult to find [accommodation] elsewhere because they do need appropriate supports.

“These are people who have NDIS clearance, are medically cleared to be discharged from hospital but there simply aren’t places for them to go.”

This comes after the South Australian Government criticised the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) for its “complex and lengthy processes”.

Nearly 140 NDIS patients were taking up desperately needed hospital beds over the last month despite having “no health reason to be there”, a Parliamentary Committee heard in late-July.

The Committee was also told that 69 of those NDIS clients had been approved for discharge more than 100 days earlier but a lack of specialist disability housing prevented their release.

The new Regency Park facility will initially only take patients from the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN) and will be run by CLO in partnership with Wellbeing SA, Uniting SA, CALHN and the Office of the Chief Psychiatrist.

At the Where to From Here Conference in June, NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said the Labor Government will focus on the “quality” of the spending rather than fixating on the dollar amount to improve the system’s functionality.

“We need to work with participants to identify ways to empower participants to find the most effective supports to achieve their agreed goals,” says Minister Shorten.

“And we need to ensure that providers have incentives and support to achieve the goals of participants and the NDIS.”

A report from the Summer Foundation and La Trobe University suggested many NDIS participants were in hospital between one and three months longer than needed, but there was “substantial variation” with some people spending months or years unnecessarily in hospital.

Mr Shorten took to Twitter yesterday to flag his visit to Caulfield Hospital in Victoria to meet with hospital executives and to listen to frontline staff caring for NDIS participants.