Does specialist disability accommodation meet the NDIS funding criteria for you?

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Like all supports, the laws for the NDIS tell us what we can fund in your plan. We’ll only fund specialist disability accommodation if it meets all the criteria set out in these laws. We call these the NDIS funding criteria.

We also need to make sure that funding you for specialist disability accommodation and other supports meets the funding criteria better than other options.

In particular, we need to know specialist disability accommodation:

helps you pursue your goals
is effective and beneficial for you
is value for money
is most appropriately funded by us
won’t likely cause harm to you or other people.

To help us decide if you’re eligible for specialist disability accommodation, we’ll think about:

whether it will help you pursue your goals
how it will work with the other NDIS supports in your plan
if it will help you do more daily tasks yourself when compared to other supports
if different supports could help you pursue your goals, or might even help you more.

For example, we’ll look at what is stopping you from living in a standard home that isn’t specialist disability accommodation. We’ll think about whether there are NDIS supports we could fund to make that possible for you, such as home modifications.

Specialist disability accommodation might reduce your need for other supports compared to where you live now. Or, it could help you pursue other goals in your plan.

We need to know that specialist disability accommodation will help you with your disability support needs more than other NDIS supports. To work this out, we think about whether specialist disability accommodation will be better than other NDIS supports to help you:

reduce the impact your disability has on your daily life
improve your functional capacity – the things you can and can’t do due to your disability, or stop your functional capacity from getting worse
learn new skills and abilities over the medium to long term
maintain your supports, such as your informal supports
reduce the amount of support you need. For example, you might need less support if you are living in the right type of home.
pursue goals for major life events. For example, you might want to move out of home or move in with a partner.

We have to make sure that specialist disability accommodation is value for money, compared to the cost of other supports.

Over time, specialist disability accommodation may help reduce the costs of other supports you need.

We think about whether specialist disability accommodation:

means you don’t need as many NDIS supports in other parts of your plan
will reduce the cost of other NDIS supports you need
can help you be more independent for longer
will help keep your NDIS supports and relationships
would work well with other NDIS supports in your plan
will affect the total cost of all NDIS supports in your plan.

We’ll also think about if you can share NDIS supports with others or if you get informal supports from family and friends.

When we decide if specialist disability accommodation meets the NDIS funding criteria for you, we look at why you need the home and living support. We need to make sure your housing is most appropriately funded by us, rather than other government and community services.

We fund specialist disability accommodation if you need specialist housing to meet your disability support needs and it's an NDIS support for you.

Other government and community services are responsible for providing housing and accommodation if you don’t need specialist disability accommodation for your disability support needs.

They need to make sure you have access to accessible, affordable and appropriate housing, including social housing.

For example, if you can'tafford private rental accommodation, you can apply for social and community housing. Also, state and territory governments are generally responsible for emergency and long-term accommodation for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Learn more about the community and mainstream supports that we can help you connect to.

For more information about the homelessness services in your state or territory, check out the Homelessness Australia website .

Learn more about who is responsible for your housing support needs .

Like all funded NDIS supports, we need to assess any risks. Specialist disability accommodation might reduce risks you have in your current home. We also can’t fund specialist disability accommodation if it’s likely to cause harm to you or someone else.

We’ll talk to you about:

any risks to you or others about the home you live in, and whether specialist disability accommodation would help with these risks
how specialist disability accommodation will work with your other home and living supports in managing these risks.

We’ll talk to you about how we can manage these risks. For example, if you need any other supports to manage risk, and so you're safe. We can talk about this with you during your check-in.