23/10/2025
Who will these “needs assessors” really be?
Yesterday’s parliamentary hearing gave us a concerning insight into the NDIA’s next big experiment — independent assessments by people who don’t need to be allied health professionals.
According to NDIA Deputy CEO Aaron Verlin, the Agency plans to employ 80 allied health professionals to train and accredit assessors, but the assessors themselves will not require allied health qualifications. Instead, the NDIA will hire people based on “soft skills” like empathy and communication.
Let’s pause there.
Needs assessment in the NDIS is not a customer-service interaction — it’s a clinical assessment process that determines access to life-changing funding, supports, and outcomes. These assessments require a deep understanding of functional capacity, psychosocial factors, diagnostic interactions, developmental frameworks, and disability-specific impacts across domains of life.
Training a workforce of non-clinicians to make decisions that directly influence funding allocations is not reform — it’s risk. It risks:
• Misinterpretation of clinical information and functional evidence
• Inconsistent and inequitable outcomes
• Further erosion of professional integrity within the NDIS
• Increased burden on participants forced to appeal inaccurate assessments
The NDIA suggests that a short training course with the University of Melbourne will equip assessors to perform these tasks. But what qualifications, regulatory frameworks, or professional standards will apply? Who will be accountable when decisions are wrong?
Allied health professionals spend years developing the expertise to assess, analyse, and interpret functional capacity. These are not “soft skills.” They are clinical competencies, guided by ethics, codes of conduct, and evidence-based frameworks.
If the NDIA wants fair, transparent, and person-centred decision-making, it must invest in qualified professionals — not dilute the process through de-professionalisation disguised as reform.
