Deirdre

Deirdre used to work as a manager in different organisations providing NDIS-funded services. She left the sector after six years.

‘I just couldn't deal with what was going on within that industry any more,’ she said.

Deirdre identified two main issues common to all the organisations she worked at.

‘Firstly, the training is, I was going to say poor but non-existent is probably a better way of putting it.’

She told the Royal Commission that widespread labour shortages make it very difficult for service providers to find workers.

‘There’s no people to hire … At one organisation, they literally just have people on the street and go, “Oh, would you like to come in and work for us?” And I'm not actually being flippant about saying that. It did happen.’

‘So we've had unqualified people, we've had people who have been 18, 19, 20, quite young, no experience with people, with some quite severe behavioural issues I suppose that they had to manage. And that wasn't a good experience for the employees but it definitely wasn't a good experience for our clients either.’

She described this as one of the ‘biggest issues’.

‘That people just didn't have any training going onto their first shift and they just had to wing it, which would explain why sometimes things just aren't done right because they formed bad habits from other people who have formed bad habits. And it just is a roll-on effect basically.’

Deidre is also concerned about the ‘really poor governance and oversight’ within the organisations she worked for.

‘By poor governance I mean poor financial management, poor people management. There's a lack of integrity and transparency in some of it as well, around the way that they seek their funding, or they report things or not report things depending on if they think they're going to get in trouble for it.’

Deirdre told the Royal Commission about an incident at a supported living home, where CCTV footage showed a support worker bullying one of the residents. When Deidre and her team investigated further they found the supervisor at the home was absent for much of the time.

‘When we looked into it, we could see other incidents or heard about other incidents that had happened, but nobody in the home was going to actually raise it and say, “Hey this is a problem.” It wasn't until we had a new starter come on board and say, “Hey, you know, this isn't right. I've been other places and, no, no, I'm not okay with this.” If it wasn't for that person, this could have continued indefinitely.’

At another home, restrictive practices were common. The residents were supposed to be taken on outings but actually didn’t leave the house for months at a time.

‘The lives of the staff were made easier by ignoring the needs of the residents,’ Deirdre said.

Deirdre believes leadership in the industry needs a ‘really big cleanout’.

‘They understand the nursing side and they try and focus on that, but then the leadership side and the governance side starts to fail. Whereas if you get someone in there who's got leadership experience but not really the nursing side of things, then the nursing side can start to fail. And trying to find those people who have got both skillsets is like a unicorn in an industry that doesn't have enough people to start with,’ she said.

‘And there very much is a culture, I'll say, of coverup, but it's actually got more to do with the oversight of it. They don't even really need to cover it up because no-one's looking. There is no safety check in place to make sure that these things don't occur.’