Welcome Packs and NDIS Compliance
Welcome Packs are one of the most valuable aids for NDIS compliance because they can really help NDIS participants understand how a service provider promotes their rights. And that’s what the NDIS Practice Standards require — in a nutshell.
To be clear, we’re referring to a set of documents that explain an NDIS provider’s Quality and Safeguarding measures — not pens and travel mugs and stress balls.
The Practice Standards don’t require Welcome Packs, in so many words. But they can help providers meet a lot of the NDIS requirements.
As with all things related to NDIS Quality, it’s not what you have, but how you use it that matters. So, how can you best use Welcome Packs?
Promoting NDIS Participant Understanding
The NDIS Practice Standards promote certain objectives. In this case, the important NDIS objective is choice and control. NDIS participants have the right to make informed choices — to have access to the information needed to determine what’s best for them.
The Standards state specific topics on which information must be provided. These include: rights and obligations, the conditions under which supports are provided and might be withdrawn or denied, the risks involved, how service providers manage incidents and information security, and how to make complaints about the service.
Welcome Packs are a great way to provide this information. Because it’s all in one place, and because participants and their supporters can keep referring back to the material as they need.
How to create Audit Evidence
Compliance starts with making the information available. Be sure that providing the Welcome Pack is a documented part of your intake process. It can be documented in policy, on the intake form, as part of staff training, in reviews and surveys.
Making the information available is just the start. The Practice Standards ask for more. They require that participants understand the information. Welcome Packs don’t ensure understanding, they merely provide the opportunity for understanding. They are, therefore, only partial evidence of compliance with the Standards.
If the Welcome Pack is written in easy-to-read language, and all participants receive a copy that they can show their support network, the evidence to suggest understanding is quite a lot stronger.
Of course, participants can ignore information. We all tend to skip the privacy policy and terms and conditions — don’t we? If they do read it, the language of rights and incident management can be a little technical, even when written in plain language. Or, after some time, they might simply forget.
So, how can you make the evidence stronger? How can you ensure participants understand?
Well, there are a few ways. The evidence is reinforced if your intake processes remind staff to ask relevant questions, to explain the information verbally or through a translator, if needed.
Review processes that prompt staff to remind participants (or even re-issue the Welcome Pack) provide even stronger evidence. And participants’ review-process responses too. Evidence that participants make use of the supplied information — e.g., feedback and complaints records — is particularly strong.
Of course, there are other ways to ensure that NDIS participants understand their rights, and providers should use all the tools at their disposal. Welcome Packs have the advantage of acting as a marker, a known starting point to which the other techniques can refer. That’s the key to turning Welcome Packs into evidence for audit. As we’ve said: it’s not about having a Welcome Pack, but how you use it that matters.
Free PQplus Welcome Pack Templates
We routinely advised our clients to develop Welcome Packs. But we knew that writing easy English is not so easy. The information needs to be correct and address all the issues required (if it is going to support compliance). That means the writer needs a comprehensive knowledge of the NDIS Practice Standards. We worried that providers might not have the resources to create packs.
That’s not good for our clients, and not good for NDIS participants. So, when we took on the challenge of creating Welcome Pack templates, we decided to release them to all NDIS providers, for free.
The design had to be generic to support compliance in a wide variety of NDIS services. It had to be modifiable without need for expensive graphics software. And suit a range of printing options.
Because they were created by PQplus, you can be confident that the information is correct, and that they work strategically to satisfy NDIS compliance requirements — so long as you follow the advice in this article. We know they are used by large and small NDIS providers across Australia. So, it seems they’ve worked out OK.
We’re now celebrating 2500 downloads of our free Welcome Pack templates. Follow this link to get your own copy!
The templates are Word documents, and fully customisable. Providers can use the templates in any way they want (as long as they don’t sell them!). Print them as they are or use only the text. If you’ve downloaded the PQplus Welcome Pack Template, we’d love to hear how they’ve worked for you. Like Lorraine did….
Your ‘Welcome’ pack is a fantastic aid for us and participants.
The brochures are clear and concise, thanks for availing these to everyone!Kind regards, Lorraine Auvinet (Energon Australia)
Thanks, Lorraine. We appreciate that a lot!