IMHA’s Self-advocacy for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) project has seen the development of the Self-Advocacy for the NDIS workbook, as well as a comprehensive training package that assists NDIS service providers and other mental health professionals to support the people they work with to advocate for themselves at any stage of the NDIS process.
The project is guided by the experiences of people with lived experience of mental health issues, mental distress, and the NDIS. All resources are co-produced with people with a lived experience, and all training sessions delivered with a lived experience co-facilitator.
Jeremy LeRoux has recently been appointed as the NDIS Lived Experience Consultant role to the project team, which further embeds the importance of lived experience expertise into the project model.
‘Lived experience workers demonstrate how to provide a more compassionate way of engaging with and working with people who experience mental distress, because they are able to connect in ways that people who don’t have that "shared understanding" cannot,’ Jeremy LeRoux, NDIS Lived Experience Consultant.
The most recent evaluation of the project demonstrated the effectiveness of the training and resources with attendees reporting they now felt much more able to support people to self-advocate. One of the attendees contacted IMHA after the training to let us know that they had now been able to advocate for their own NDIS package, ‘I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the Self-Advocacy for the NDIS training and resources, because now I’m going to have NDIS. I thought for years I wasn’t eligible and once I realised I was, I was too scared to apply! My psychologist will now be helping others who attend her clinic apply for NDIS. Now that she knows the process is actually not that hard with having the templates you gave me as guidance,’ they said.
As the project enters its fourth year, we will see more training sessions delivered with lived experience trainers as well as the development of a co-designed self-advocacy web application for consumers.
More information
For more information about IMHA’s Self-Advocacy for the NDIS project, contact Project Coordinator Ellisa Scott by calling (03) 9093 3701 or email NDISTraining@imha.vic.gov.au
Reviewed 26 November 2021