NDIS cuts therapy hours for Brisbane woman against expert advice

Brisbane woman April Coulson's life changed forever seven years ago when she woke up paralysed from the armpits down due to a bleed on her spinal cord.

"It was pretty terrifying," she says of that day. "My strength and my ability to even sit up was completely gone."

Road to recovery

After spending six months in hospital, April returned to her parents' Brisbane home, where she had to relearn how to perform daily activities with the help of support workers funded through the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

"I was extremely dependent," she says. "When I first came home, I was still struggling to get up out of bed. I couldn't transfer. I could barely hold myself up in the chair for more than an hour at a time."

The NDIS also funded her wheelchair, a ramp into the bottom floor of her family home, and daily intensive therapy sessions, including exercise physiology, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy.

"In the very early stages, it was sometimes twice a day," she says. "It was amazing. One of the whole reasons that I am where I am today was the support I was receiving."

Cuts to therapy hours

However, the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) has recently slashed her therapy hours by two-thirds, from six to two hours a week, against expert advice.

"It is expected the disability support workers have appropriate qualifications and training to complete the role they have been employed to complete and assist you in implement (sic) exercise routine," the delegate wrote in a written internal review decision.

April says using support workers would be unsafe and that she does not have the specialised equipment at home required for her rehabilitation sessions.

"I'm already extremely injury prone with severe osteoporosis and other complications," she says. "To put myself in the risk of someone who isn't qualified is just a danger to me."

Concerns from NDIS architect

Dr Martin Laverty, one of the original architects of the NDIS, says he's very concerned by the cuts to participant plans being made against the evidence of health professionals.

"There's something very wrong with the way in which our assessment for people with disabilities is currently operating," he says. "The National Disability Insurance Agency is pulling back on therapeutics, it's pulling back on active overnight support, it's changing the way in which people can access the community."

"If a health professional is providing a recommendation that a therapy is so important to April, and thousands like her, we should be funding those supports under the NDIS because that's why the scheme was set up in the first place."