Another update from National Disability Services on July 1 changes to the NDIS.
An outcome of the joint pricing project between NDS and the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) is that providers of personal care, skill development or community access supports will be able to charge for up to eight late cancellations or no-shows against a participant’s package per year. This will help address a commonly raised concern of providers who currently bear the full cost of late cancellations or no-shows.
Service agreements between participants and providers will need to detail advice periods for cancellations and changes to agreed appointments. Where there is a high risk that a participant will frequently not show for an appointment, the provider will be expected to have arrangements in place to maximise the likelihood that the participant will receive all their required supports.
Note that this new policy does not apply to therapeutic or transport supports.
Further information on the cancellation policy is available in the ‘Support Clusters Definitions and Pricing‘ lists (effective 1 July 2014) which are now available.
Following the letter that providers received from the NDIA last Friday, NDS would like to make it clear that the NDS-NDIA joint pricing working group did not agree on an efficient (future) price for self-care and community participation. What was agreed is that data collection is needed to refine the assumptions that underpin a methodology; work on developing this should begin shortly. Throughout the project, NDS argued that the NDIA’s assumptions about an efficient price were unrealistic. The report recommended transitional prices, but disappointingly the prices announced on Friday by the NDIA fall short of those prices.
The report on the joint pricing project will be released in coming weeks.