Over the coming weeks, you’ll see a steady stream of short videos from us about the NDIS reforms introduced to Parliament last week. Almost every one of them will carry the same hashtag — #IAmMoreThanICannotDo.
Here’s why.
The report that started it…
Close to two years ago, Tara, our General Manager of Corporate Services, opened another thirty-page Occupational Therapy report about her son.
“Page after page of someone who doesn’t live with him, doesn’t know him like we do, detailing everything he couldn’t do. Every way he was different from his peers. Everything he didn’t meet the standard measure for.”
A friend, another mum who had been through the NICU experience, told her that her own paediatrician had advised her not to read these reports at all. They were simply too upsetting.
“As a mum, it is really horrible to read a report that basically says your child isn’t going to be the next Prime Minister, isn’t going to win gold medals, is probably going to struggle to be average. That’s okay as a mum. But when it’s printed in hard copy across thirty pages and that’s the focus — that’s hard to digest.”
Out of that frustration came a simple line:
I am more than I cannot do.
It’s a reminder. For families. For support workers. For planners, allied health, and providers. For anyone who reads a report and forgets there’s a whole person behind it.
Image: Tara celebrates her five year milestone with Director Vickie Starr.
What the NDIS reforms actually require
The reforms now before Parliament will ask providers to capture a much greater volume of evidence specifically, evidence of a person’s functional capacity without the supports they currently rely on.
In practice, that means more documentation. More scrutiny. More focus on what someone cannot do independently — across every domain of their support, recorded for the intensity and persistence of help required.
Tara has spent years at CSBS building the data ecosystem that makes this kind of evidence-gathering possible. We can already show a planner or support coordinator what a person was able to do independently at the start, middle, and end of a support period — and whether that level of independence has shifted.
That capability is going to matter more than ever.
But evidence cannot be the whole story
Capturing evidence is one thing. Capturing it ethically is another.
“We have to be really mindful about what we’re capturing, who’s going to access it, what we’re doing with that data, and how long it’s recorded for. Is it really necessary to record what somebody has had for their meal for the last three years? Not unless it’s directly related to their disability, their goals, or because an allied health professional has asked for it.”
Alongside the #IAmMoreThanICannotDo campaign, CSBS is committing to two pieces of work that will sit underneath everything we capture:
- An Information Governance Framework what we will record, what we won’t, and why.
- A Data Ethics Charter built around one question: would the person we’re writing about be happy to see what we’ve written?
We’re also watching the balance between documentation and presence. A support worker buried in forms is a support worker pulled away from the person they’re meant to be alongside providing support.
CSBS will be releasing sample evidence packs shortly – the packs demonstrate the data we capture, how we present it and the strength that it brings to the voice of advocacy.
A challenge to providers, and to ourselves
To other providers heading into this same cycle of evidence, evidence, evidence: we’d ask you to keep questioning it. Is this what the person actually needs? What are we doing with the data once we have it? Is there a better way? Are we capturing the whole person, or only the gaps?
And to the people we support, and the families and nominees walking alongside them: if a provider talks to you about capturing evidence, please challenge them. It’s right that the evidence is gathered. It’s also right to ask how, and why, and what for.
Because at the end of every report, every data point, every assessment – You are more than what you cannot do.
Stay with the series
Follow CSBS on LinkedIn , Facebook, and Instagram to see the full series as we publish it. Every video will carry #IAmMoreThanICannotDo.
Questions about this article or the campaign?