Safeguarding in Australia’s new disability markets: Frontline workers’ perspectives

Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an individualized funding scheme, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Analysis of survey data (n=2341) showed almost half of frontline disability workers were aware of harms affecting clients in the past year, and three in five felt their employers’ safety and incident reporting protocols were inadequate. Workers’ accounts of barriers to performing their safeguarding roles underline how government’s meta-regulatory approach is enabling provider organizations to prioritise financial concerns and tolerate high safety risks. We argue that advancing the rights of people with disability to be safe from harm whilst engaged in social services requires changes in their external regulatory environments and in structures of power between workers and managers, so that policy, funding and regulatory settings enable appropriate local safety practices to flourish.