### GT: Sam?

ST: George, it’s an interesting kind of dilemma, I think, because you don’t want to be testing whether you’re doing well and being too distant from people but you’ve got to balance that with people maybe feeling a bit uncomfortable about talking about things that might be things they don’t like to a support worker they see every day. So how you as organisations set up arrangements where people get to know others in the organisation whose job it is in fact to check in that they’re happy with what they’re getting and that has to be I think a little bit separate to the support workers. So I think some kind of mechanism people should be exploring to do that quality check-in with people just to touch base and say “I’m just ringing to see how it’s going or I’m just going to pop over and have a cup of tea to see how you’re going. Are you happy with what we’re doing for you?” and just getting a bit of distance then from the people who actually provide supports. Other mechanisms I think that are really important are around how staff supervision works and performance management, and that has to be as so many of these services where there’s such a direct impact on people’s lives that there has to be real investment in that and building up staff capability but also – well their behaviours and thinking about how you shape behaviour and how you deliver a support. We’ve got a great resource that you helped us design in the - give a plug to the worker orientation module, and thinking about the things that you can do in your day-to-day work that would make a difference for people. But I think people have to understand, I think, that it’s not going to be a satisfactory way of measuring if people are happy by just getting to tell their support worker or getting feedback through supervision from a support worker. You’ve got to have something else in the mix there. GT: Absolutely. Before we wrap up I just want to give you an opportunity to speak to the providers that might be listening, are there any final words of wisdom from on high that you’d like to share with people listening? GH: Look, I always think it’s very important when a system is relatively new, which of course the NDIS is, the national quality and safeguarding arrangements, SDA and the way it is is new is to I guess remind – we all need to remind ourselves that there’s a lot of learning to be done in every part of this in order to evolve these arrangements in a way that works for the people who access these services and also works for the people who want to be in the business of providing these services. So, we of course have ideas, some of which we’ve shared in today’s podcast, but we also invite people to challenge some of our ideas and also to make suggestions. There needs to be, I think, a very lively ongoing conversation about how this area of activity in the NDIS evolves over the coming years. ST: There’s a pretty big close I guess on leaving people with one last message. We’re a regulator and people can often find that dynamic, a bit confronting, but the Commission’s here because we need to give providers a steer about what is going to make a difference in people’s lives in participating in the NDIS. So the tools and the things we ask of providers are not things we made up in abstract that are somehow

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