Disability support in SA on 891ABC
16/12/2013
Naomi Clarke, Disability Support Recipient & Kelly Vincent, Dignity for Disability MLC (891ABC 12.47-12.51) Disability support in SA
(Presenter: A funding dispute may force a young disabled woman to separate from her husband and live in a nursing home. She says this is because the Government has not allocated the extra funding needed to keep her at home. Disability advocates say the National Disability Insurance Scheme should help prevent such situations but that it may be too late for some … )
(Reporter: Now in her forties, Naomi Clarke is educated, married and has made a home. She’s also been in a wheelchair since she was five after her spinal cord was severed during an operation … Naomi Clarke needs care 24 hours a day, which until now has been provided by her husband, Paul, with some assistance from the South Australian Disability Sector, but the financial strain has become too much and now Paul has returned to work … Disability SA funds 60 hours of a care per week, the maximum available. That’s being used to keep Naomi Clarke breathing during the night when her husband sleeps, but she needs to be monitored during the day which would require another $60,000 in State Government funding.)
Clarke: I’m being forced to make a decision to either stay at home without financial support or assistance from the department, or going to supported care. And that supported care would be somewhere like Highgate which would mean that it’s breaking up our family.
(Reporter: To complicate the matter further, Disability SA doesn’t recognise Naomi Clarke’s respiratory condition as a disability but rather as an issue which should be dealt with by the Health Department. South Australian Dignity for Disability MP, Kelly Vincent: )
Vincent: This is not actually about Naomi, this is about a systemic failure that this Government has put to people with disabilities time and time again where a very strict funding model leads to people not actually have the supports that they genuinely need.
(Reporter: Are there many people in her situation? … is this economical for the Government?)
Vincent: Yes, it is because by our calculations it would certainly be more expensive to keep someone like Naomi in fulltime nursing home type care and … it would likely have severe impacts on her mental and physical health.
(Reporter: Kelly Vincent says funding issues like this are all too common and isn’t sure that will be addressed adequately under the National Disability Insurance Scheme.)
Vincent: … time and time again we hear Government Ministers and members of government saying … with the National Disability Insurance Scheme incoming we can expect a change in this and this and this area, but the fact is that people like Naomi Clarke cannot afford to wait and the Government still has a responsibility to these people while the scheme is incoming.
(Reporter: Naomi Clarke has presented a petition with 60,000 signatures to the Premier Jay Weatherill. Mr Weatherill’s office says the Premier and the state’s Disability Minister are organising to meet with her as soon as possible.)
