Because medium term accommodation is not a standalone support, we’ll include it in your plan as part of your home and living support needs. For example, you might need medium term accommodation to help you move into specialist disability accommodation.
If you’re waiting for your long term home to be ready, medium term accommodation might be right for you. Or there might be other supports that better meet your needs.
To work out if medium term accommodation is right for you, we’ll also look at:
- any assessments of your support and accommodation needs
- your allied health professional reports
- your daily support needs reports.
This helps us understand your current situation, strengths, barriers, and daily support needs. Don’t worry if you don’t know all this straight away. We’ll help you work it out.
We may also ask for other assessments if we need more information to make a decision. If we do need more information, we’ll include funding for those assessments in your plan.
We want to fund the right home and living support options for you – ones that will work for you now, and in the long term. When we look at this information, we have to think about all your home and living supports. We want to make sure the supports work together to meet your needs.
When we assess your options, we think about whether the supports will help you to:
- pursue your goals
- improve or maintain your ability so you can do things with less support
- reduce or maintain your need for person-to-person supports
- strengthen connections with your community, health services, education and work.
We’ll assess all the information and decide if medium term accommodation is the right home and living support for you.
We’ll only fund it if you meet the eligibility criteria for medium term accommodation, and it meets our NDIS funding criteria.
We’ll try to let you know our decision within 10 days.
When we decide to fund medium term accommodation we’ll include it in your plan.
Learn more about how your plan can change.
What other supports could we fund while you’re in medium term accommodation?
Medium term accommodation funding only covers the cost of the accommodation. It doesn’t include the disability supports you might need while you’re there.
You can use the other supports in your plan while you stay in medium term accommodation. For example, you might already have funding for personal care or social and recreation support.
If you need extra supports that aren’t in your current plan, let us know.
For example, if they meet the NDIS funding criteria, we may fund:
- assistive technology
- extra support while you’re in medium term accommodation, for example if you need more personal care support than you usually need at home
- support to help you move into medium term accommodation.
Can you use medium term accommodation funding to pay long term rent?
No. You can’t use medium term accommodation funding to pay your rent or mortgage once you’re in your long term home. This is because long term rent or a mortgage is a day-to-day living cost we all have to pay for, whether or not we have a disability.
You can only use funding for medium term accommodation while you stay in that accommodation, and while you’re waiting for your confirmed long term home.
What if you don’t agree with our decision?
If medium term accommodation doesn’t meet our NDIS funding criteria, we can’t include the support in your plan.
There are lots of ways we might be able to help though, so talk to us if you’re in this situation. For example, we may include other home and living supports that meet your needs.
We can also give you written reasons on why we made the decision. Contact us if you’d like reasons for our decision.
If you don't agree with the decision we’ve made, you can ask for an internal review of our decision. You’ll need to ask for an internal review within 3 months of getting your plan.
Learn more about reviewing our decisions.