I have been a Disability Support Worker since 2019 and began employing other Disability Support Workers to help ensure my clients actually survived when the pandemic kicked off in 2020. I also run the NDIS plans for my family members which means hiring Disability Support Workers to come into our home, so I get a fabulously rounded perspective on this one. I can tell you that good Support Workers change lives. The relief of competent support is profound, especially when things have been bad for years. It’s like the storms don’t go away but you finally have a roof on your house to keep out the weather. Support workers can also drive me batty, they are exhausting, daft, unreliable, and uncomfortable as hell. They can also be an intensely vulnerable, isolated, and dehumanised workforce. There’s a lot of perspectives to consider.

One I want to talk about today is not shared very often. I hate hiring Support Workers for my family. It seems so strange for those of us with NDIS funding – we so need the help, we’re so relieved to finally have a plan, there’s all the weird survivor guilt of having access to a resource when many are denied and in need, and then there’s the gap between what we need and what have to do to get it. This is a small gap for some folks. They call a couple of agencies, get onboarded, and away you go.

For me and many like my family, it’s just hard work, and this work is largely invisible and rarely discussed. I don’t like the uncertainty, I don’t like the getting to know each other part, and I don’t like the energy it takes to deal with people coming into our space and not yet knowing how to do things our way. It’s stressful. I don’t like having to look around and interview people. I hate onboarding a new agency. I hate having bad experiences, being patronized, lied to, bullied, manipulated, harassed, and let down. It takes spoons and bandwidth to find, onboard, and train staff. It takes savvy, patience, and time. It takes optimism, hope, and the belief that our needs are legitimate and can be supported. It takes getting over the intense embarrassment of asking/letting someone else do a stack of tasks that I feel are my responsibility. It takes letting people see us, our limits, our mess, our struggles, our bad days, me in a dressing gown at 6.30am getting kids ready for school, a doom box of paperwork with the important document for today’s medical appt lost in it somewhere, getting a call to say someone’s had a meltdown and the Support Worker doesn’t know what to do. Things that make me feel vulnerable. Things that make me feel like a failure. Things I don’t want seen that are now painfully visible and picked apart in functional capacity assessments and shift notes.

So if this has been hard for you too, take heart. You are not crazy, or ungrateful, or alone in this. There are many, many things that can make getting started with Support Workers difficult, and there are many things people have found can make it easier. People can and do navigate these hurdles and wind up with great support. Being able to understand and talk about the hurdles in the first place can help.

I’ve seen people who have never had a Support Worker, folks who had one amazing one they lost at some point, and folks so fed up with the workers they’ve tried they’ve just run out. It’s easy to get stuck. Many of us find the messy ‘first draft’ process just exhausting. We want to jump straight ahead to the part where things are running smoothly. The workers know us, they are attuned, they are responsive, and they know where the tea towels live. Dealing with the process it takes to get there… that’s another matter. The good part of all of this, the part that’s worth hanging on is this. We used to get block funding delivered to organisations who decided all of this for us. What support we needed, which workers they hired, and who was eligible. As much as I hate the workload, I love the freedom and flexibility. I get to hire the people I want, to do the tasks I actually need help with, at the times and in the ways that suit me best. I have the choice and I have the control. The hurdles come with that, but the freedom is pretty appealing when you remember how the system used to work.

Diversity Hurdles

Diversity is a common hurdle for folks. The main training for Support Workers is a Cert 3 in individual support. It’s generally focused on stable disabilities that don’t change a great deal over time such as blindness or an amputation, and on providing personal care such as assistance with showering, feeding, continence and so on. If you are dealing with a disability that fluctuates radically, has an unpredictable course, and/or includes mental health challenges then you’re a little out of the wheelhouse of a lot of the workforce. If you’re trans, or polyamorous, or CALD, or live in a remote area, or immunocompromised, or nonverbal, you’re dealing with all the extra issues of ignorance, confusion, stigma, or just unsuitable support from worker who don’t speak your language or understand your experiences.

Organisational Hurdle

If your disability impacts your organisational capacity this can also be a huge hurdle. Researching, interviewing, training, and managing staff can seem like a ridiculous extra burden if you’re the kind of person who forgets to eat without reminders.

Communication Hurdles

If your disability impacts your communication or relationship capacities you can find yourself swamped by the bizarreness of a system set up for people with disabilities that presumes you can communicate, negotiate, provide feedback, and regulate a bunch of relationships.

Poverty and Housing Stress Hurdles

Poverty is not spoken about enough in this area, but the power dynamics and relationship differences between support for those in severe poverty and those in good circumstances is profound. NDIS is not intended to relieve poverty or replace any other services which means when other services fail, we can have appalling situations such as one of my clients being funded for daily support but being homeless and his phone breaking – how can we even find him when he’s sleeping rough in the park? If you’re struggling on a low income or falling through gaps in other services, Support Workers and all the other NDIS resources can be so much harder to implement.

Trauma and Anxiety Hurdles

Trauma is a common and significant challenge in this space. Many of us have had abusive experiences in personal relationships, medical settings, and with providers. It takes a lot of courage or desperation to let strangers into our lives and homes. I remember once I was having a horrendously bad week, and a friend kindly arranged a cleaner to come to my home. I really appreciated the idea but I’d never had a cleaner visit before. I was so overwhelmed and embarrassed it caused a panic attack and I cancelled the visit – then felt awful about that and ashamed to let my friend know their kind gesture was too much.

What if getting help makes you dependent and even less functioning? What if you lose the help at the next plan review, just when you were feeling safe and secure and things were working? What if a Support Worker takes advantage of you, steals from you, manipulates you, deceives you? These fears are significant barriers for many people and can mean vastly underspent plans and high risks for people with disabilities who are not getting basic needs met.

Overwhelm Hurdle

Overwhelm is a constant, chronic, harrowing state of existence for many of us and trying to add in supports can be just more demands to feel swamped by. Inexperienced or mediocre workers need a lot of hand holding and this can be more energy than it’s worth.

Abelism Hurdle

Ableism is also a huge barrier for many of us and this goes two ways. Support Workers who don’t understand our disability can bring a lot of ableism in with them and it’s exhausting. They might look at your functioning body and say ‘you don’t need help with meals’, because they don’t know enough to recognise that your lack of hunger, anxiety about eating, severe sensory issues, and no cooking skills mean you are clinically malnourished and living on a starvation diet. You need support with planning, buying, and preparing food, and probably with reminders to eat and assistance to make it a more comfortable experience. Support Workers who don’t understand this can add to your sense of shame and invalidate your real needs in ways that leave you worse off.

We often have our own ableism that trips us up. Personally I’ve found this is often more severe for invisible disabilities, and more likely for issues that went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a long time. If you’ve spent years being told you’re lazy and just need to try harder, it can be mind bendingly difficult to ask a Support Worker to come and do that task for you. You shouldn’t need the help. It’s a waste of their time. It’s a waste of tax payer money. Someone else probably needs it more. It’s not that big a deal.

Specific Needs Hurdle

The more specific and inflexible your needs are, the more time you need to invest in training your support workers to do things correctly. There’s so many things that can mean our needs are very specific – because you have a life threatening allergy, a complex household with multiple disabilities, severe sensory sensitivities, a recent history of sexual assault, or OCD specificity about how your cleaning needs to be done. The general guide is: the more flexible we can be about our support the less time we need to invest in training and onboarding. The more we need things done a specific way, the more we need to educate, create checklists, have allergy paperwork on hand, and so on.

There’s nothing wrong if your needs are specific, I’m not judging. We all have them in some areas of our lives, and we are often pretty oblivious to how not intuitive they are until someone else blunders through and whilst trying hard to be helpful actually makes a mess of things. If you, like me, have a dog that must be put outside and have the laundry door closed when the last person leaves the house, you can’t assume a Support Worker will know to do that. And if you, like me, get busy and disorganised and forget about that, then you will absolutely come home to find your shoes demolished on the back lawn!

The first time someone helps you make a curry and cuts the onion into wedges when you need them minced finely so you don’t have chunks of slimy onion in your mouth when you’re eating, you will realise that what’s normal to us is not everyone else’s normal. If it’s important you’ll need to communicate it, and to do so respectfully and in an accessible way where your staff are able to remember it and get it right.

There’s many things people do to help overcome hurdle like this, and I share some ideas in this post Navigating Hurdles to using Disability Support Workers. But step one is recognising that the hurdles are real, even if you can’t easily understand or articulate them. We start by finding solidarity in our peers, finding we are not alone in our struggles, and moving away from shame and towards compassion. It is at times hard, and that’s okay. The opportunity to choose and create our own supports is truly an incredible one, and here in Australia we are the envy of the world for the freedoms offered by the NDIS. I am reminded of a line from a favourite book:

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one

The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin

Don’t give up, there is excellent, safe, inspired support out there.