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Some people may need support to understand healthy eating or to prepare healthy food due to their disability. Some people may need support with both. This could be because of physical, cognitive, or psychosocial disability.
When we decide support for meal preparation meets the NDIS funding criteria, you can get this support in 2 different ways.
Disability Support Worker
When you need a support worker to help you with your daily living tasks this might include meal planning, shopping, and meal preparation. This funding will be part of your core budget.
We’ll only include funding for a support worker in your plan if you can’t do these tasks independently because of your disability and if it’s not reasonable to expect friends and family to do this or they aren’t able to.
A support worker can help you to build your skills so you can start to prepare more of your own meals.
Prepared and delivered meals
You may need to access prepared and delivered meals for a limited time. You can use your funding for meal preparation supports flexibly to pay for a pre-prepared and delivered meal service. Learn more about using your meal preparation supports flexibly.
For us to include funding in your plan for help to prepare meals it must meet the NDIS funding criteria. Generally, we’ll fund supports that will help you learn how to do these tasks yourself over time. However, we know some participants may always need help with meal preparation. Supports for meal preparation will not be reasonable and necessary for everyone though.
To work out how much meal preparation funding to include in your plan, we’ll think about:
- what supports you currently have to prepare meals
- how much time a support worker would need to help you to prepare meals. If we include this support to help you become more independent, this will usually reduce over the length of your plan.
- whether you are expecting any changes where your friends, carers or current support workers will be unable to help prepare meals for a period of time
- what participants with a similar situation to you have in their plan.
We’ll also think what programs are available in the community to help you prepare meals.
If other supports in your plan already help you with meals, we generally won’t include funding for help with meal preparation. Other supports which help with your meals could be supported independent living, short- or medium-term accommodation or daily assistance.
When we work out how much meal preparation funding to include in your plan, we won’t include the cost of food or ingredients. Food is an everyday living cost for everybody, whether they have a disability or not. You’ll need to pay for the food yourself.
If we include meal preparation supports in your plan, you can choose which provider you want to help you learn how to prepare your meals. You can decide with them how they will provide the support. This funding is in your core budget and is flexible.
This means that if you have a temporary change in circumstances and need to have meals prepared and delivered to you instead of using it for a support worker you can do this without the need for a change to your plan.
Learn more about using meal preparation supports flexibly.