Mary

Mary is a young woman with severe disability and no living family. She experiences chronic pain and is a wheelchair user. In her submission, Mary told us her disability support provider has abused and exploited her over many years. ‘Years of being fobbed off. Playing with my life,’ she said of her provider.

Mary said the support provider lied to her, telling her that her state funding covered a maximum of two hours of domestic assistance a week, which didn’t include food preparation. Mary only recently learnt that this was incorrect and that her funding had always paid for five hours that could be used for any of her needs and to keep her safe and independent in her home. Mary was always supposed to have the choice – domestic support, social support, respite or a combination of different types of support.

Instead, without consulting her, the provider decided Mary would have two hours of domestic support and three hours of social support. ‘I never wanted social support,’ Mary said. ‘I was told this had to be this way.’

Support workers provided Mary’s social support. Every support worker, year after year, refused to provide domestic help, which was what she really needed. ‘They don’t clean … they all demand tea and coffee that I have to provide and pay them to drink,’ said Mary, because ‘they are here to do social support not work’.

‘One kept yelling,’ Mary remembers, ‘leaning into my face, dragging out her words and drawing pictures in the air … I’m not intellectually disabled’. Mary has also been a victim of child abuse: ‘I can’t handle people that close to me in my face yelling.’

Mary said the workers would always move things in her home, despite her explaining that she needed things in certain places so she could reach them. But the workers would treat it like a joke and move things around anyway. Mary told the provider many times that they need to train their staff in disability, but the response was that training is a waste of time – that these things are ‘common sense’.

Meanwhile, Mary was ‘going in and out of counselling, many breakdowns and physical health deterioration fighting for more domestic help, food preparation help … all those tears and stress and two attempts to take my life’.

Mary complained many times about the service. And each time she had a health problem – broken limbs, breast cancer, a relapse – she would beg for more help. They would have a meeting in which Mary was ‘loud and clear’ about her needs, and a new care plan would be written. But the staff never acted on the new care plans. One day she saw her file open on the provider’s computer and found out why – it was because no care plan had ever been recorded.

‘How many others are in my situation?’ Mary asks. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I just wanted help.’