People recovering from surgery, injury or a hospital admission, who may need intensive support for a defined period and much less afterwards.
Registered NDIS Provider · 405 358 3296
NDIS Assistance With Personal Activities in Queensland
Personal care from workers who are matched to you, not allocated to you.
What is assistance with personal activities?
Assistance with personal activities is NDIS support with the daily tasks of looking after your own body. Showering and bathing, dressing, grooming, oral hygiene, toileting and continence support, help with eating and drinking, transfers and mobility around the home, and assistance with medication.
It’s funded from Core Supports, under Assistance with Daily Life, which is the most flexible part of your plan. That flexibility matters here because personal care needs change. A fortnight after surgery looks nothing like a fortnight in a stable stretch, and Core funding can usually absorb that without a plan review.
Support can be scheduled for a set time each day, spread across mornings and evenings, delivered overnight, or arranged as a short visit a few times a week. What it looks like depends on your routine, not on what’s convenient to roster.
Who this support helps
Participants with intellectual disability or autism who manage most of a routine independently but need prompting, sequencing or supervision at particular points in it.
People living with psychosocial disability, where the barrier isn’t physical capacity at all. On a bad week, showering is not a small task, and having someone arrive at nine and quietly make it happen is the thing that keeps a week from unravelling.
Participants with degenerative conditions, where needs increase over time and the support has to keep pace without the person having to explain themselves again every few months.
And families providing care themselves who need the load shared, particularly with the parts of personal care that are hardest to sustain between a parent and an adult child.
How the support works
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It starts with a conversation about how you like things done. Not a standard checklist. Which side you prefer to be supported from, what order you do things in, what you’d rather manage yourself even if it takes longer, what you absolutely don’t want a worker doing.
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That gets written into a support plan the worker reads before the first shift, so you’re not explaining your own routine to a stranger while standing in a towel.
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We then match a worker, and we take the match seriously. Gender is the first question and often the most important one. Language matters. So does temperament. Personal care puts someone in the most private parts of your day, and a worker you feel comfortable with is not a nice-to-have.
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Wherever we can, we send the same one or two people rather than whoever is available. Consistency is the whole ballgame in personal care. A worker who knows your routine does in twenty minutes what a new worker needs forty for, and does it without you having to direct every step.
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Where a plan calls for it, we work to guidance from your occupational therapist, physiotherapist or continence nurse, and our workers follow the manual handling and equipment instructions those clinicians set.
The problems participants run into
Worker turnover is the complaint we hear more than any other. Participants describe explaining the same routine to a different face every fortnight, which is exhausting and, in personal care, genuinely undignified.
Cancelled and late shifts do particular damage here. A late community access shift is inconvenient. A late morning personal care shift means someone is still in bed at eleven, and may have been holding on to use the toilet for two hours.
Rostering that suits the provider rather than the person is another. Being told your shower is at 1pm because that’s what fits the run, when you’ve showered in the morning your entire life, is a small thing that stops being small when it’s every day.
Gender matching gets treated as a preference rather than a requirement by some providers, and participants are made to feel difficult for asking. It isn’t a preference.
And there’s the thing people rarely say out loud: asking for help with your own body is hard, and many participants delay it far longer than they should. Some are managing risky transfers alone rather than have a conversation they’re dreading.
How GOTLEHS CARE helps
We build a small consistent team around each person rather than a rotating roster. Usually one primary worker and one backup who has also met you and read your plan, so a sick day doesn’t mean starting over with a stranger.
We treat gender matching as a requirement, not a request. You will not have to justify it to us.
We roster to your routine, and we’re honest at the outset if we can’t cover a particular time slot in your area. It’s better to hear that on the first call than to accept a service that quietly drifts to a time that doesn’t work for you.
If a worker is running late, you get a call. Not a message afterwards explaining why nobody came.
Our workers hold NDIS Worker Screening clearances and work under the NDIS Code of Conduct, and as a registered provider we’ve been audited against the NDIS Practice Standards, which cover exactly this kind of support. If something isn’t right, you can raise it with us or go directly to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission without coming through us first.
Talk to us about personal care
Frequently asked questions
If your question isn’t here, ring us on 0425 799 687. We’d rather answer it properly than have you guess.
Can I choose the gender of my support worker?
Yes, and you don’t need to explain why. We treat gender matching for personal care as a requirement rather than a preference, and we’ll tell you honestly if we can’t meet it in your area at the times you need rather than sending someone and hoping it’s fine.
Will I get the same worker each time?
That’s what we aim for. We build a small team around each participant, usually a primary worker plus a backup who has met you and read your support plan, so illness or leave doesn’t mean starting again with someone who knows nothing about your routine.
Which part of my NDIS plan pays for personal care?
Core Supports, under Assistance with Daily Life. It’s the most flexible budget in your plan, which helps when needs change temporarily, for example after surgery or during a period of poor health.
Can you provide personal care in the evening or overnight?
We can, depending on your location and our capacity at the time. Evening support is generally easier to arrange than overnight. Ring us with the specific times you need and we’ll give you a straight answer rather than a maybe.
Can support workers help with my medication?
Yes, within the scope of what a support worker is permitted to do. That usually means prompting and assistance with medication that has been prepared and packed appropriately. Anything clinical sits with a nurse, and we’ll tell you clearly where that line falls in your situation.