Disability in New Zealand

News and Publications

e-newsletter - Issue 31 - October 2009

In this issue:
Equipment refurbishment programme
Update from the Group Manager
Plain English Awards
EMS re-prioritisation work shops
Consumer Consortium
Provider Forums
Local Area Coordination
Individualised Funding
Supported Independent Living
New! Community Residential Support Services Booklet
NGO-MoH forum
DSS Staff changes
Working Together More Fund

Download this newsletter in in PDF format:

• Disability Services Provider E-Newsletter: October 2009 (PDF, 580 KB)

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Equipment Reissue Programme Saving Millions

Enable New Zealand’s successful disability and rehabilitation equipment reissue programme is proving to be a million dollar savings bonanza. Since the initiative began gathering momentum about four years ago, the number of equipment reissues for the past two years has risen to 62,000 items – representing an average annual saving to the health sector of $13 million. Reissues in 2005 reached 22,000, but now they are topping 32,000 per year and are showing no signs of slowing. About 45 percent of the total applications now handled by Enable New Zealand each year (around the 75,000 mark) involved reissued equipment.

Even though clients basically had the equipment for life, reissuing did occur if a person’s needs changed or the item was no longer required. The success of this project rests largely with Enable New Zealand working closely with Allied Health Specialised Equipment Assessors (usually in this instance occupational therapists and physiotherapists) about the most cost-effective solutions and options.

If a Specialised Assessor can get a piece of equipment for a client issued from our store, it not only saves on the budget but reaches the end-user much quicker. There are considerable benefits involved. Enable New Zealand have introduced a pilot system this year where District Health Board Specialised Assessors were able to view the equipment available and decide whether it would suit their clients’ needs. As a result there has been a jump in the amount of reissued equipment.Nearly all the new rehabilitation equipment used in New Zealand is imported and delivery times can range from eight to 10 weeks. If refurbished equipment is on the shelf and available, the client can get that equipment in a much shorter period of time, particularly if they have been on a waiting list.

A diverse range of items, ranging from a set of crutches to $30,000 wheelchairs, arrive back at Enable New Zealand’s centres in Palmerston North and Christchurch every day to be cleaned, washed, refurbished or repaired for future use. Many of the reissued items, like walking frames, shower chairs and stools, help people to stay in their homes longer.

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Update from the GM Anne O’Connell

Group Manager
Disability Support Services
Health & Disability National Services

As you will be aware, the government released information about changes to the public health system on 21 October. This decision will mean a number of changes for us here at the Ministry – although the exact nature of these is still being worked through. I would like to assure you that there will be no changes to the services disabled people and their families receive, or to existing contracts with providers. The intended changes are related to the organisation, structure and functions of the Ministry of Health and DHBs. I will keep you updated in future issues as these changes take place.

For us it is business as usual until further notice. Its been a busy couple of months since our last newsletter with progress being made on our work programme. Updates on Local Area Coordination, Supported Living and Individualised funding are included later in this issue. We were pleased that our fact sheets about the disability support services we fund were short-listed for the Plain English Awards. This shows that while there is still much work to be done around information we are moving in the right direction.

In the last newsletter I mentioned that we were working on many pieces of work that overlapped and that we needed a framework or plan to bring these together. This combined with the pressures we have on the budget has resulted in us contracting with Deloitte to review our purchasing framework as we realised the job was too big for us alone. The project is in the early stages and we will be happy to share the outcome with you. The project will include discussions with providers. The final report is due in early January 2010.

Although the weather seems to have resembled winter more than spring recently, I am hopeful that summer is just round the corner. I look forward to meeting some of you at the provider forums as I hope to attend most of them.

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Plain English Awards

Health and Disability National Services (HDNS) was excited to be short-listed as a finalist in the Plain English Awards. These awards are held annually and recognise government and non-government organisations who promote and use plain English in their communications, websites, documents and organisations.

HDNS entered a series of fact sheets about Ministry of Health funded disability support services in the Plain English Champion — Best Project Award category. These fact sheets are part of a wider project that Disability Support Services is working on with the Federation of Disability Information Centres to improve information for disabled people and their families.

At the awards ceremony, hosted by Fair Go’s Kevin Milne, there were performances from the NZ School of Dance and the Jazz Quartet with Colleen Trolove. The Improvisors showed some remarkable skill with the English language, and the guest speakers actor/writer/director David McPhail and Mucking In’s Jim Mora kept us entertained with funny stories and some amazing mimicking of a famous American leader talking gibberish…

Unfortunately we didn’t win an award this year, but being short-listed as a finalist is a great achievement. This serves as a challenge to us all to improve the way we write, and enter documents and projects in next year’s competition.

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EMS Reprioritisation workshops

We want to make sure that disability support services focus on the needs and expectations of consumers and their families. Understanding these needs and expectations is critical to make sure that funded services provide the maximum benefit to the individual consumer and their family.

In July 2009, a review of access to equipment and modification services found that the current two-tiered priority guidelines used for applications didn’t work. We realised we needed another way of understanding and deciding the priority of needs for consumers wanting equipment and modification services.

Prioritising is the process of allocating funding and services on the basis of need and ability to benefit, to ensure a ‘fair’ or ‘just’ system. Two essential elements of a ‘fair’ system are transparency and consistency. Ensuring a fair decision relies on a consistent and clear assessment of need.

A fair, transparent and needs based prioritisation will allow the Ministry of Health to reliably identify the level of need that is not being met among disabled people and their carers. This information can then be used for planning purposes including determining the level of funding available for equipment and modification services.Disability Support Services together with Acqumen Ltd looked at (among others) the current model of prioritisation used in accessing elective surgery. We want to trial this model with a series of development workshops involving consumers and disability professional groups over the next six weeks.

What will happen in the workshops?

Real cases will be prioritised to identify what values or criteria are important to consumers. Methodology will test and confirm the relative importance of the values identified by the groups.

What will the outcome be?

A robust, priority assessment guideline. This guideline will allocate the highest priority for access to equipment and modification services, to those with the highest need and likelihood of benefiting from services. The guideline can then be applied consistently by consumers, assessors, Accessable and Enable NZ.

We will let you know the outcome of these workshops in a future issue.

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Provider Forums

Coming soon to a location near you! Join us at one of the forums in either November or April for an update on what’s happening in Disability Support Services.

We are doing things a bit differently following our recent restructure, and combining our forums for all DSS teams. This is so we can reach as many providers as possible in the constrained fiscal environment. Forums will be held twice a year at five locations around the country, and the agenda will focus on different service areas each round, so you can decide if the forum is relevant to you.

In November we will be talking about DSS current priorities, Community Residential Services, Individualised Funding and Quality.

If the forum in November does not contain relevant topic areas for you, then these will be covered in the next round of forums. We are, of course, happy to speak to any one of you in person on issues in between times.

Please RSVP by OCTOBER 23, 2009 to Robyn Mills at Robyn_Mills@moh.govt.nz or 07-858-7058

November Forums
Date	Location	Venue
November 4	Auckland	Jet Park Hotel Conference Centre (this is in the Jet Park Airport Hotel) Conference Room One 63 Westrey Road Mangere, Auckland
November 10	Rotorua	Rotorua Convention Centre West Room 1170 Fenton Street Rotorua
November 12	Palmerston North	The Convention Center 400 main Street West Palmerston North Manawatu
November 17	Christchurch	Trade Union Centre 1st Floor 199 Armagh Street Christchurch
November 18	Dunedin	1 Harrop Street, Dunedin

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Consumer Consortium

From L-R:
Front Row: Simona Mataiti (PIASS); Lee Rutene (Ngati Kapo o Aotearoa Inc); Mervyn Cox (Deafblind Inc); Carolyn Weston (Association of Blind Citizens); Jacqui Carlson (CCS Disability Action); Lolomania Filiai ( PIASS).
Middle Row: Tina Mataiti (support person); Jennifer Birch ( Autism NZ); Lena Berger (Rescare NZ Inc); Venessa Rice (Parent to Parent NZ); Gillian Smailes (Hearing Association); Zandra Vaccarino (NZ Down Syndrome Association); Graeme Parish (People First); Jan Moss (Carers NZ); Mathilda Schorer (CCS Disability Action); Anne Wilkinson (Parent to Parent NZ); Karen Pointon (Deaf Aotearoa NZ).
Back Row: Hilary Stace (Autism NZ); Chris Orr (RNZFB); Trish Anderson (IHC Advocacy); Kevin Anderson (Brain Injury Association); Harvey Brunt (Cerebral Palsy Society of NZ); Rainus Baker (People First).

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Work programme update

The Report of the Social Services Select Committee’s “Inquiry into the Quality of Care and Service Provision for People with Disabilities” outlined a number of recommendations that the government needed to respond to. The government Response to the Select Committee’s report accepted the Committee’s conclusion that improvements should be made to disability services, and set out a wide-ranging work programme for making those improvements.

The Disability Support Services Group is responsible for many of the initiatives set out in the government response. Its current work programme includes:

Investigating Local Area Coordination (LAC) processes

In our June newsletter, we outlined our visit to Western Australia and Queensland to look at the LAC-type processes that are in place there. Since then, we have carried out a stocktake of LAC-type services that are already available in New Zealand, and have commissioned a literature review of LAC-type processes, which we expect to receive in late October.We have also provided the Ministerial Committee on Disability Issues with an interim report, which led to them agreeing that the investigation of LAC-type processes be extended to investigating a new model of supporting disabled people that incorporates the key elements of Local Area Coordination, but also includes other features such as an emphasis on supported living and individualised funding. We are currently carrying out that investigation and will report again to the Ministerial Committee once it is completed.

Individualised Funding and Supported Independent Living

Increasing disabled people’s choice about day- to-day living arrangements.

Our current work in this area includes expanding the use of supported independent living and increasing access to individualised funding. To date we have updated the service specification for Supported Independent Living and are currently developing a pricing model with a plan to provide this service to more people around New Zealand.

We undertook a review of the Individualised Funding Scheme last year to see how it is going and to see how we want to improve it. Individualised Funding offers disabled people the funding and choice on who provides their support needs when they need it. We are currently planning now to provide this funding system to more service providers and a greater number of disabled people. We have undertaken to have a new national model in place by May 2010.

Providing age-appropriate alternatives for younger people with high needs who are now placed in rest homes.

We are currently undertaking a wide review of young people in aged care. From this we will develop options for young people to have more choice in where and how they live.

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NGO - Ministry of Health Forum

NGO Challenges for Changing Times

On Monday 19 October 170 representatives from Health and Disability Non-Government Organisations throughout the country met in Wellington at the 14th NGO Working Group - Ministry of Health Forum.

Jo Fitzpatrick (Chair of the NGO Working Group) welcomed everyone to the forum with Kaumatua Bruce Aranga and started the day off with an outline of some of the challenges facing the many different organisations at the gathering. After morning tea, Hugh Lawrence and Diana Suggate from the Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector gave a presentation about the work they are doing at the moment and their upcoming NGO forum on 11 November. Then participants had time to work together and discuss ways to improve the relationships between health NGOs and the government. Comments and feedback are being collated by the NGO Working Group and will be included with information gathered at the Office for Community and Voluntary Sector November forum.

The Hon Peter Dunne and Hon Tariana Turia both spoke at the forum along with Stephen McKernan (Director-General of Health). At the end of the day there was an opportunity for the attendees to discuss challenges not yet covered and to provide some general feedback to the Working Group.

For more info about the forum go to http://www.ngo.health.govt.nz/moh.nsf/indexcm/ngo-currentactivity-forums-19oct09?Open&m_id=5.1

For more information on the NGO Working Group go to www.ngo.health.govt.nz/

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NEW! Community Residential Support Services Booklet

The Ministry of Health has developed a new booklet for disabled people thinking of living or already living in the community residential support services (CRSS) that it funds - primarily people with intellectual disabilities, and people with physical/sensory disabilities - and their families. This booklet comes in both a full and Easy Read version. We expect the Easy Read version will be used by a wide range of people, especially those with an intellectual or learning impairment and those for whom English is a second language.

This is the first time we have had such a booklet, and the focus is on what services and rights people can expect now. We see this as the first but not the last version of this booklet. The booklet was developed with the support of the Ministry of Social Development, and after consultation with Disability Support Services Consumer Consortium members, a number of other individual disabled people and family members, and a range of organisations, including DPA, People First, NRID, IDEA services and other intellectual and physical disability providers and NASCA.

We will be direct mailing copies out to a range of organisations. They will also be available from Needs Assessment and Service Coordination organisations and disability information services. The booklets will be available on line soon at www.moh.govt.nz/disability and can be requested by emailing dsd@moh.govt.nz, or leaving a message on 0800 373-664.

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Staff changes

New Staff

Karen Smith
Development Manager
Family & Community Support Team

I have joined the Family and Community Support Services Team as a Development Manager after being immersed in managment, machinery of government and corporate planning for a number of years which includes the Ministry of Health for the past 5. The scope of my recent role with the Ministry was development of the Performance and Reporting Team and frameworks within the Programme Management Office overseeing projects, performance, reporting and quality assurance within the National (Information) Systems Development Programme. I am very much enjoying being part of a great team, within DSS and working more closely with the sector. My current portfolio includes Individualised Funding, Home and Community Support, Carer Support and Respite.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with whanau and friends, good food and the warmer weather here in Auckland!

Kristina Maclean
Executive Assistant
Group Manager DSS

I am the EA for Anne O’Connell and have been working for DSS since February this year. I enjoy this fast-paced role and the variety that comes with working for the DSS group - the different services and projects the group is involved with, and the fact that there is always interesting work to be done!

Outside of work I enjoy running and swimming and anything that involves the great outdoors. By contrast, I also love reading. I laugh off ideas that books will ever become less popular than on-line versions, as anyone who commutes by train will know, everyone has their nose buried in a book.



Cheryl Billett
Contract Relationship Manager
Family and Community TeamI have been working in the health sector for the past 20 years most of that time in Public Health in various roles although in my most recent position I was working with two PHOs in Lakes DHB. I started my career in education and had a break whilst raising two sons and during that time completed further education. My foray into health began as a health promoter in the Bay of Plenty with a focus on child health. This was followed by some time at what was then Health Waikato working in cervical screening which was extended to include breast screening. I spent some time working in a national health promotion role with the National Screening unit. During my time with the Public Health Directorate I had a national focus on Health Promoting Schools and a real passion for nutrition and physical activity and was part of the subsequent development of strategies
to implement this. My knowledge of and experience in this sector to date has been around intellectual and physical disability within extended family. I bring to this position my professional and personal experience and a great capacity to learn much more about it.

I am married to Robin and we live in Tauranga. Our sons are both recently married and based in Auckland and Tauranga after time overseas.



Tima Tuinasau
Executive Assistant
Community Living Team

I arrived in New Zealand on the 30th of June 2008 from Fiji and joined the Ministry of Health as a Temp EA for the Cancer Team in the Sector Capability and Innovation directorate in December 2008. In Jan 2009, I moved to the Disability Support Services Group as a temp EA for the Intellectual Disability (Compulsory Care & Rehabilitation) Act Team and then the Community Living Team, which is now my current permanent role, which I enjoy.

I am married with no children and my motto is, “Do not grow weary of doing good, for in due season you will surely harvest if you faint not”, Galatians 6.9.

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Staff movements

• Karen Hyland, Manager - Community Living Team
  Karen was previously a Contract Relationship Manager in the Family and Community Support Team. She has many years experience in the disability sector and has extensive networks in not for profit, private and government organisations. Karen has a background in nursing and has a Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA).
• Samantha Lynds, EA - Strategy and Contracting Support
  Sam is providing EA support on a part-time fixed term basis to the Strategy & Contracting Support Team.
• Fiona McLeod, Contract Relationship Manager - Service Access Team
  Fiona has been working as a CRM covering parental leave. She is based in the Christchurch office and will be with us until Jan 2010.
• Sarah Chattin, EA - High & Complex Services/IDCCR
  Sarah has been working as a Executive Assistant within Disability Support Services over the last 18 months. Sarah has worked as part of the Planning and Development Team and is currently supporting the High & Complex/IDCCR area. Sarah is returning home to Georgia, USA in November.

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Working Together More Fund – He Putea Mahi Tahi

Four funding organisations – the Todd Foundation, Tindall Foundation, Wayne Francis Charitable Trust and the J R McKenzie Trust – are introducing a new fund known as the Working Together More Fund – He Putea Mahi Tahi.

The aim of the fund is to assist community organisations to make a greater difference for the people and communities they serve, through working together more closely with other organisations.

Increasing collaboration may not be right for everyone, nor will it necessarily save money; but many organisations that have worked closely together report real returns for the efforts, including improved services for their consumers.

Groups of two or more organisations which are interested in exploring how they might work more closely together can apply for financial assistance and/or expert help.

The first closing date for He Putea Mahi Tahi is 13 November 2009. We appreciate that this is very short notice; however we’d like to get under way this year, and believe that some will be in a position to apply. There will be more funding rounds in 2010, the next one closes on 12 March so there is more time to get things together for that.

Please feel free to:

• visit Working Together More Fund website on http://www.tindall.org.nz/working-together-more-fund for more information, and contact details for Barbara Edwards, the fund’s administrator
• talk to others and consider applying
• pass this on to others you know who may be interested.

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The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views of the Ministry of Health. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this newsletter, the Ministry of Health is not responsible for any ommissions, inaccuracies or changes that may have taken place after publication.