Living with Disability Research Centre Online Seminar

Trigger warning: These presentations will look at cases where people with disabilities, workers, and in one case a worker’s unborn child, died as a result of service provision. The cases also involve serious harm to people with disabilities and workers, including sexual assault.

Learning from deaths and serious harm: Reflections on quality, safeguarding and safety in service provision

Our June online seminar will draw on cases under work health and safety law regarding service provision to people with disabilities. It will also look at two recent cases in which civil penalties were imposed on service providers under another law, the NDIS Act, for failure to provide safe care.

This seminar will be co-presented by Dr Alan Hough, Director at Purpose at Work and Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, and Dr Dru Marsh, Senior Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Both Dru and Alan are also practising board members of disability service providers.

Australian work health and safety enforcement regarding service provision to people with disabilities: Lessons for service providers

Dr Alan Hough, Director, Purpose at Work, and Adjunct Professor, Living with Disability Research Centre, La Trobe University

Work health and safety legislation applies to all workplaces, including those where disability-related supports and services are provided. It is thus relevant to people with disabilities and the workers supporting them.

The legislation allows work health and safety regulators to take enforcement action against people and organisations that breach their legal duties, including through prosecution and agreeing to enforceable undertakings.

Using legal databases and registers of enforcement actions, the presentation examines 27 such cases and their circumstances and identifies nine lessons for providers of services to people with disabilities.

Issues for WHS policymakers and regulators

Dr Dru Marsh, Senior Adjunct Lecturer, Public Sector Research Group, University of NSW

Drawing on the same cases, Dr Dru Marsh will identify 7 issues for policymakers and regulators to consider in stewarding the evolution of work health and safety law and practice and which might be pursued by advocacy organisations in seeking change.

Seven key issues for policymakers and regulators – and thus for advocacy organisations – are identified.

Prosecutions by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission: the first cases

Dr Alan Hough and Dr Dru Marsh

The NDIS Commission has now launched 6 prosecutions in the Federal Court of Australia against NDIS service providers, with two of these cases now resolved.

Both concluded cases involved the largest-ever penalties being imposed on service providers in relation to quality and safeguarding issues. Implications for practice, policy and research will be identified.