Born from a genuine desire to create real choice

The story of how we came to be

 

An unfair lack of options

Impacted by continual conversations with frustrated, fed up, angry and exhausted families, Jane Morrell, our founder was shocked. It just wasn’t fair and that there was such a significant lack of options when it came to care for people living with disability and their families.

 

“I was just shocked and disappointed. The more I researched the more I learned how hard families had it. I couldn’t just walk away and hope somebody else solved the problem”.

 

Frustrated by an industry fraught with stigma, limited options and difficult to navigate systems, Jane set off to understand the complexity, unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape to find what could be fair and fitting for families with disability.

This wasn’t an overnight exercise. Meeting with family after family, often travelling hundreds of kilometres, Jane spent countless hours meeting with families face-to-face in order to fully comprehend the enormity of the challenges they faced and what could be done.

Through these genuine and often heartbreaking conversations, Jane found an underlying constant; that the intentions of Support worker service providers and the reality were just way off.

The cold hard reality was, families were facing

• Limited availability of support workers
• Having unknown Support Workers enter your home
• Complete no-shows
• A terrible lack of consistency in the quality of care received
• Impractical and inflexible ‘traditional care agency’ models
• A lack of flexibility such as 3-hour minimum callout fees
• A lack of understanding around needs leading to concerns about quality of care
• Really low levels trust across the board

All of this led to significant mistrust in a system that was just failing to deliver.

 

“As a human I felt an huge sense of responsibility. How could we think we live in such a ‘progressive country’ and mistreat people like this?! I felt an innate responsibility to make this right”.

 

Designing a better option

Fuelled with stories of the families she met, and the thought of how many more there are living the same experience, Jane set about designing a better option.

Researching the sector:
Speaking with peers and key people, Jane went into fact-checking mode. By establishing what was possible rather than what was said to be possible laid down a foundation to develop something new.

The idea of the NDIS:
Through exploration Jane found that what we know today as the NDIS was on the horizon. In draft form, the ambition was to put the power into the hands of participants and families. For this to happen families needed organisations to offer services that could be vehicles of choice and control.

Looking beyond our shores:
Exploring models and services from overseas, Jane found inspiration and ideas that could be shaped into a a service model that could be lead by the family, not the provider.

Looking beyond to other sectors:
By leveraging existing employment frameworks and working out how to interpret them to suit , Jane developed a service model that families can use to directly employ the support they need.

 

“The biggest challenge of all has been operating with commercial thinking within a government framework. You need to bring the ambition and problem solving mindset of commercial business to solve problems like this’.

 

Testing and learning in order to design a useful solution

With a principal service model in hand Jane had an opportunity to establish what a better future could look like. But it certainly wasn’t as easy as setting it up and turning it on.

It all started by pounding the pavement and finding opportunity. By exploring programs and services Jane found a number of opportunities for families to trial the service including the DHHS direct employment pilot program, engaging with recipients of Funds in Court and engaging with a number of courses offering short term respite packages.

This gave Jane and her developing team a great opportunity to shape our services around the true needs of families and understand where we can have the most positive impact.

 

Serving a community vs. being part of the sector

As we still are today, the focus of Carer Solutions was about serving a community, not being part of the sector. Because of this we were 100% foreign to everyone. Being challenged at every turn with a responses like ’you can’t do that’, ‘that’s not possible’.
But Jane and the team knew they were breaking new ground, and continually fighting against the resistance was a sign that we were making a positive change. Something we continue to do every day.

Through endless reviews of forever changing legislation, thousands of hours with lawyers and leading experts and a number of significant court cases, we have come out with a growing community of people we partner with everyday who hire who they want and trust as their Support Workers.

 

Scaling something good

Fuelled with the desire to make a positive impact on the lives of as many people possible, Jane began meeting with relevant stakeholders, lawyers and industry experts to establish how to scale this unique service that would solve such a crucial problem within the sector.

With the passing of the NDIS legislation in 2013 and the subsequent national rollout starting 3 years later, families finally had funding they could control. With this control and the choice delivered by Carer Solutions, families were finally in a position to be able to employ Support Workers they wanted, Support Workers they know and trust.

 

Carer Solutions today

Since 2011, we have positively impacted over 10,000 lives through our Directly Employ service which enables people to directly employ the Support Workers they know and trust.

And after a few years of building honest and human connections with our Partners, we’ve found an inherent need to create a personalised Plan Management service, enabling our Partners to get the most out of their NDIS Plan.

For over 10 years now, we’ve been co-creating lives filled with genuine choice and relationships that come from a place of heart, authenticity and trust. And we look forward to continually challenge the status quo, fight for fair, and seeing our Partners live self-determined lives.