An Aged Care loophole is rescuing young people denied disability help
Desperate Australians with disabilities are turning to the Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT), an elderly care service, for their basic needs. And ACAT has been expecting them.
People in their 30s have successfully gotten ACAT help, after coming to the service with official denials from the NDIS. ACAT is allegedly telling them that the service is ready to work with anyone who has an official denial.
While this might not contradict the denial story, others have said that ACAT turned them away because they weren’t over 65. So it appears that ACAT are specifically making an exception. There are reports of workers telling the disabled that ACAT was fully aware that they would have to supplement people wrongly turned away from the NDIS.
As every great and respectful journalist does these days, I took a lot of this information from reddit.com threads, where people often confirm that ACAT have an assessment process like the NDIS — but that it’s much quicker, and you’re more likely to get help.
In one r/australia thread that I’ll link here, a throwaway account (someone who invented an online identity so they could stay anonymous) said they had ongoing problems getting support for their brain cancer.
Today I found out from CarerGateway.gov.au that the Aged Care Assessment Team, via MyAgedCare.gov.au can assist people who have formally been rejected from NDIS.
Thanks Reddit. You are the new media and you know it.
How can I benefit from this?
If you go to myagedcare.gov.au, you’ll see arrows pointing you through the process. It’s a beautiful site.
Typically you begin the assessment by clicking the blue ‘Start here’ tab and following the instructions, which are unusually well laid out for a government site. But maybe you want to do it in person. In that case, take the usual steps:
- Call them on 1800 200 422, say you have an official denial from the NDIS and explain exactly what you need.
- Go to https://www.agedcareguide.com.au/acats and find your town.
- Visit your doctor, take your NDIS denial and tell them about the exception ACAT is making.
This is nothing new
This kind of ping-ponging from one public service to another has become common in recent years. The government currently has a neoliberal and fairly populist government, meaning that their voters reward them when they take away any money that the privileged see as ‘unearned’. That means charity, foreign aid and mostly welfare.
Other public regulators like the Administrative Appeals Tribunal have had harsh words for the NDIS and its agency. Deputy President Gary Humphries said that the communication and planning was so bad, it prevented them from ruling on cases where appellants said their support was wrongly taken away.
Centrelink whistleblowers have also told the media that welfare sites and software are deliberately hard to use, and that disabled and unemployed people losing their passwords is an expected part of the process.
That’s why we need a little more initiative. We need to get creative, but because creativity is a fickle skill that a lot of people can’t quite work out, I and many others are here exploring the answers. Good luck and treat yourself well.
If this tip was useful, there are plenty more help methods at Disspoken:
The Aussie mental health system is broken. Here’s how you can still get assistance.
