Response to D-G's letter on supported accommodation

Brendan O'Reilly, Director General of the NSW Dept of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, (see this post from last Saturday) did convince this letter writer (Letters to the Editor, Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 16th February 2009) that DADHC is going anywhere near far enough to meet the need for supported accommodation for people with intellectual disabilities:

Don't pretend you care
I acknowledge that Brendan O'Reilly's department has been chronically underfunded for decades (First Word, February 14-15) and that he has had a "loaves and fishes" task trying to make the money go round. However, I object to the bureaucratic spin that would have your readers believe O'Reilly has a responsive department and that services are well in hand, if not improving and increasing, as he suggests.

What O'Reilly should be telling us is that of the 315 new supported accommodation places created in the past 2½ years, only 51 have gone to disabled people coming from the family home. The rest have gone to people coming out of the Department of Community Services and the prisons. Of the 51 new places, only 10 have been for the Sydney metropolitan area. In fact, more ageing parent carers have died in this period than have new places been made for their family members. Only O'Reilly could call this "growth".

I am now in my fourth decade of caring for my much loved severely intellectually disabled son. I want my fellow Australians to know that we have a crisis of unimaginable proportions on our hands.

Lifelong carers of middle-aged disabled sons and daughters are dying without having had any experience of retirement and without the peace of mind of knowing what will happen to their family member after they are gone. O'Reilly's department provides accommodation and support for about 3 per cent of the total number and the rest stay at home indefinitely. Other developed countries have services in place, but our country doesn't even have a plan for them.

It is time that we debated whose responsibility are these Australian citizens. After all, a disabled child can come to any family at any time. Having the correct support services in place gives the whole community a safety net; not having them in place diminishes us all and makes our society less civil.

Meanwhile, I send my best wishes to O'Reilly for a happy retirement. We would like to join him in retirement if he could just find us a supported accommodation placement for our son, whose name was put on the department's register 28 years ago. About 15,000 families are ahead of us.

Estelle Shields
Denistone