Step 1: Understand your role in helping your patients access the NDIS
Your role as your patient’s treating healthcare professional is to help them with their application to the NDIS by:
- completing the treating professional section of their access request form
- supporting them to contact the NDIS
- providing information about their disability and their impairments
- providing information about their impairments and the effects on their day-to-day function.
Step 2: Assess your patient’s day-to-day functioning
You will need to provide supporting evidence on what your patient is able to do and how their impairment affects their functional capacity and ability to do day-to-day activities. These are referred to as functional domains.
When you are assessing their functional capacity, you will need to objectively consider:
- the tasks the patient can do without support, aids or modifications (and be able to provide clear task-specific examples)
- how the patient’s impairment impacts their functional capacity in day-to-day tasks, employment or interactions with their community (and be able to provide examples)
- what supports are already in place from family, carers, services and community and their unmet needs even with these supports
- the type and how often they need supports and aids and how they help them become more independent and less reliant on their Informal supports
- how supports will improve their social and economic participation.
We will look at the age and quality of the information when assessing your evidence.
See how to determine whether your patient is eligible for the NDIS for more information.
Step 3: Complete the treating professional section of the access request form
As your patient’s treating healthcare professional, you can support them by completing the treating professional section of their access request form.
This section helps to assess your patient’s eligibility for the NDIS by providing evidence of how their disability and impairment impacts their functional capacity.
Step 4: Provide evidence
You will need to provide supporting evidence to help support your patient’s application to the NDIS.
You should include any relevant reports, clinical letters or assessments from one or more of your patient’s treating healthcare professionals.
If you have the right skills and experience, you can prepare your own letter or report. This needs to include any information you are qualified to provide.
Evidence that you need to provide for validating a patient’s impairment can include:
- name of condition and description of the impairment(s) related to this condition
- date of diagnosis or onset and how long your patient’s functional capacity has been affected by the impairment
- any relevant diagnostic information, including diagnostician and any relevant clinical assessments used to confirm the patient's condition and related impairment
- whether the condition is terminal or degenerative.
Patients with psychological disability
If you have a patient that has a psychological disability, you will need to help them complete:
- Download the Evidence of psychosocial disability form pdf file - PDF 654.2 KB
- Download the Evidence of psychosocial disability form docx file - DOCX 318.9 KB
When providing information about the permanency of your patient’s impairment, it is important the information includes:
- a summary of the patient’s disability from onset to now
- a description of past, current and planned evidence-based treatments for the condition and resulting impairment
- a description of all engaged, evidence-based practice interventions, including medical, allied health and lifestyle based interventions
- frequency, duration and dosage of treatments and management interventions
- the response and outcomes of treatments and management interventions
- other details that affect treatment outcomes and functional capacity, including social and environmental factors
- anticipated future functional capacity.
Patients with impacted functional capacity
When providing information about the impact of your patient’s impairment on their functional capacity it is important the information describes:
- the tasks the patient can do without support, aids or modifications (provide clear task specific examples)
- the tasks the patient requires support, aids or modifications to be able to do
- clear examples of what part of the task requires support, what specific impairment impacts the task, what type of support and/or the aid or equipment required.
The language you should use
Where you use medical or clinical terminology to provide specific details of impairments, treatments, and clinical presentation, it is useful to provide a summary using easy to understand language.
This summary should make it clear what impacts the patient’s impairment has on their ability to perform day-to-day tasks.
See what is supporting evidence for your patient for more information.
Once the evidence is ready
You can provide it directly to your patient to include in their application to the NDIS.