What is Family Support?
Family support strengthens and nurtures families, building on family members’ existing strengths and skills. It encourages positive relationships within families to value, nurture and protect children, providing them with the optimum environments to learn and grow.
Caring for a child with disability is not always easy. Life events like birth, death, mental ill health, chronic illness, unemployment, parent separation, violence and abuse or financial problems all put pressure on raising a child with a disability and on their family life and relationships.
Family Support Services can help. Talking to someone about your problem is often the easiest way to begin to deal with it. Your concerns are dealt with in confidence by trained personnel who will give the appropriate support, advice and help. Click here to contact a social worker.
Whatever your circumstances Novita provide a range of highly trained staff that offer support and advice to families. This includes social workers, family service coordinators, educators, psychologists and other allied health therapists. This support helps families work through difficult issues, ensures children have a stable environment to live in, and provides support for parents and carers who are finding it hard to cope.
Coming to terms with disability
- Support and counselling to manage the impact of a child’s disability on family life including siblings, future employment and relationships
- Understanding and adjusting to a diagnosis of disability (eg what does the future hold for my child?)
- Connecting to ongoing specialist counselling
- Information about specialist support groups
Understanding the (NDIS and disability) system
- Support to get started
- Information about specialist (eg disability specific) and regular (eg CentreLink) services in the community
- Support to understand your (NDIA or other) service plan
- Support to find and prioritise services and resources in the community to meet its goals.
- Providing key information about Government benefits and other community resources
Find information on navigating the NDIS here.
Looking after yourself (and your family)
- Support to build the skills and capacity of family members
- Information about the many community supports available to families
- Support to focus on strengthening and supporting family members’ existing skills
- Support in sustaining family caring arrangement, including personal care and domestic assistance (as related to the child’s disability)
- Connecting you to support groups or other families
- Support to identify and manage stressors with innovative coping strategies
- Income (financial) support; a social worker can provide families with up to date information about the range of Government (and other) financial benefits and services available to them.
- Transport costs; family support services can provide information to families about the appropriate use of restraints for children with challenging behaviour, or can support an application for funding for a modified vehicle required to transport a child with severe physical disability.
- Modifying a family home; families may need to modify their house to meet their child’s needs. Family support services can discuss this with you and connect you to the best person to advise about home appropriate modifications.
Support to coordinate services
- Service coordination helps families to understand and connect with the complex array of regular and specialist services and resources that are available in the community.
- Coordination of Supports (low level) strengthens a family’s ability to connect to and coordinate a complex array of informal, regular and specialist services. This includes resolving crises, developing capacity and resilience in a family’s network and coordinating supports from a range of sources.
- Specialist Support Coordination (high level) that is necessitated by specific high level risks in the child’s situation. This support reduces barriers and complexity in the support environment while assisting the family to build capacity and resilience and to connect with other supports. It may also involve development of an intervention plan which uses disability support workers
Support as your child grows up
- Support to increase a child’s independence; managing supports, relationships, finances, accommodation, recreation options etc.
- Support with social skills; assisting children and families to make the most of their social and emotional strengths
- Support to access assessments such as living skills, behaviour, environment and social abilities
- Support developing strategies to assist with behaviours of concern or mental health issues
- Assisting a child (and family) with new life events such as starting school or becoming an adult
- Friendships and sexual relationships; providing information and education about relationships, friendships and sexuality
- Work and training; information about post-school opportunities, rehabilitative training, core life skills or vocational training for work-related skills.
If you would like information or free advice, speak to someone in our friendly team on 1300 NOVITA (1300 668 482) or visit our Contact Us page for more ways to get in touch.