We Are
The Real Care Initiative
The Real Care Initiative (TRCI) is petitioning to request the strengthening of the NDIS Workers Screening Check to include mandatory onboarding processes and psychological evaluations for all NDIS workers. We petition this so that we may feel safe knowing that we have social workers that care for the safety of people with disabilities and have the effective tools to make sure that this safety endures.
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The Hard Truth
60%
Of non-disabled people that have experienced abuse don’t file a police report. The number of people with disabilities still goes unknown.
Why is there a Real Care Initiative?
Following an endless dialogue with the NDIS, their safeguarding commission and the federal members of parliament, the Australian government has had no acknowledgement of the advice headed to them by the Real Care Initiative. Advice that could have proved highly significant in reducing the abuse, violence and neglect experienced by over half of the people with disabilities in 2022 alone.
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Such advice was appealed before the January 2023 reports of over 17,000 Australians living in group homes being frequently subjected to sexual misconduct, coercion, serious injury, abuse and neglect; and yet they refused to heed our warning.
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These statistics do not reflect the real number of abuse, violence and neglect in our nation, a number for which is well above the statistics presented. This number that has been known to the Australian government and the NDIS for many years, yet little action has been taken.
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Simple onboarding is a logical solution to prevention actions of neglect and violence stemming from gaps in understanding and communicating with people with disabilities. This process has been trusted to private NDIS support services, yet this remains unmonitored and unenforced. Further, a field where an individual has been entrusted to provide and enable basic human rights and quality of living to their client undergoes no psychological evaluation; a position that grants a person a large level of influence, responsibility and trust. As such, these positions have been exploited to enable sexual violence and physical abuse. Here, it is essential to understand that psychological evaluations should not discriminate against the mental diagnosis of a person, but rather their ingrained ableist, sexist, racist or abusive ideologies.
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Yet the Real Care Initiative, being founded by support workers, acknowledges that there are many workers in the field that do provide quality care and support. It is also for this reason that the Quality & Safeguards Commission should provide onboarding services that help workers scan for the violence that is so prevalent in our field. Such a service would not only increase the quality of our support work but also provides for a safer community.
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The community of people with disability in Australia has long experienced this violence with little improvement, in reporting, in reacting and in preventing. It is about time we as a nation show our beloved community that we care for them and that our government should too.
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