Penny
SDA Eligibility.
Hello. If you haven't already seen me in an earlier chapter, my name is Penny, and I'm from the Housing Hub team here at Summer Foundation. This chapter is about specialist disability accommodation, or SDA, eligibility. Eligible means you are the type of person SDA is designed for. If you are eligible for SDA, the NDIS will put SDA funding in your NDIS plan. If you aren't eligible, they won't. To be eligible to have SDA funding put into your NDIS plan, you will need to show that you have an extreme functional impairment and/or very high support needs, and a need for SDA housing. You will also need to show that it is reasonable and necessary for you to be funded for SDA. I will go through each of these areas in this chapter.
Extreme functional impairment means that even with the right home modifications and/or assistive technologies you will still need person to person support with daily activities, such as getting in and out of bed, getting dressed, moving around, preparing meals, going into the community. Very high support needs means you need a lot of person to person support and you are in one or more of these situations. Your informal supports, people who help you but don't get paid for their help, often family or friends, can't meet your personal care needs. You have spent a long time in a group home or aged care. You act in a way that puts yourself others and property at risk. Showing your need for SDA housing is a critical part of the evidence and application process for SDA. This is the part lots of people forget.
You need to tell the NDIS about your search for mainstream or other non-SDA disability housing options. You will need to show that mainstream housing is not right for you and why. And then you will need to show why SDA is great for you. It's helpful to think of it like this. How will living in SDA housing meet your needs more than mainstream housing does? And it has to be more, not just the same as. Some questions you could use to help with this are, how will SDA support you to achieve your goals, protect you from losing your skills or getting hurt, assist you to keep doing the things you can do for yourself, support you to do more things for yourself, help you to learn new things, be better value for money than other types of support, assist you to keep supports that work well for you? These questions are from the SDA rules or the SDA law and reworded to make a bit more sense.
Housing plans need to answer each of these questions. The idea of reasonable and necessary was covered in the chapter called Housing And Support Under The NDIS. You can go back and watch that chapter for a refresher if you like. Put simply, for something to pass the reasonable and necessary test, you must need it because of your disability and it needs to be good value for money. You must show that SDA is linked to your NDIS goals and represents value for money. The NDIS recently created a home and living space on their website with a range of resources available to NDIS participants. We have provided a link to this page. There is a new form on this NDIS page. It is called The Home And Living Supports Request Form. You can use it to ask for SDA funding and access to home and living supports. This may now be used to request such supports to be included in your plan. We think it is really important to think about your eligibility and the reports you have before sending this form to the NDIS.
You can ask the NDIS to fund you for support to show your SDA eligibility. People who could help you include your support coordinator and your allied health professionals, such as your occupational therapist and psychologist. You will need to put together information that shows you meet the eligibility for SDA. This is called evidence. This will include a Participant Housing Statement, a Functional Capacity Report by an OT, and a Housing Plan by a support coordinator. Now you have finished the chapters on SDA, you can do the section of the Housing Seeker Profile called NDIS Plans And Supports. If you don't have SDA funding in your plan, you can leave most of this section empty. In this part of the housing profile, you can also invite your support coordinator, planner, or someone else to help you with your search for a new home.
If you would like to use this feature, fill in the part about, do you have a support coordinator, and your support coordinator's email address. Remember that you can update your Housing Hub profile at any time if your NDIS plans or support change. In the next chapter, Lydia will talk with you about home ownership.