The NDIS one year in: experiences of carers in the Hunter trial site

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) presents an unprecedented opportunity for Australians with permanent and significant disability to receive the lifelong support they need to pursue their goals and participate in their communities. The greater choice and control offered by the NDIS promises not only to benefit people with disability but also the family members and friends that provide informal support to people with disability, their carers. The first year of the four initial NDIS trials has produced significant achievements, but has also highlighted a range of key challenges. The National Disability Agency (NDIA) has been responsive to the challenges identified and has clearly stated its intention to continuously improve the Scheme based on stakeholder feedback during the trial period. Carers NSW has been closely following the rollout of the NDIS in the NSW trial site in order to identify any issues emerging for carers. While people with disability, not carers, are the focus of the NDIS, sustainable informal care arrangements will be critical for the Scheme to succeed. This paper draws on Carers NSW research, consultation and policy analysis from throughout the first year of the NSW trial. It summarises key issues arising for carers and intends to contribute to the ongoing refinement of NDIS design and implementation. Benefits for carers in NSW Carers NSW supports the introduction of the NDIS in NSW and acknowledges that it is already changing the lives of many people with disability and their carers for the better. Benefits experienced by carers in NSW include: • Significant improvements in the amount, quality, value and flexibility of support received by the NDIS participant since entering the Scheme; • Flow on benefits for carers, including the ability to return to work, reduced stress and less financial pressure; • Some funded supports directly supporting the caring role, including domestic assistance, respite and family therapy; and • Positive working relationships with NDIS planners. Challenges for carers in NSW While many carers in NSW have had positive experiences of the NDIS, a number of key issues have come to our attention. Understanding the NDIS Many carers in NSW – within and outside the trial site – are struggling to understand, and therefore to embrace, the NDIS. This is largely due to: • limited and inconsistent information; • unclear language; • uncertainty about the Scheme rollout at national level; and • inadequate communication with carers about what to expect. Carer recognition and assessment The NDIS policy framework recognises that: • The role of carers in the life of the person they care for should be acknowledged and respected; • Planners should determine whether the informal support provided by carers is sustainable and reasonable; and • Where appropriate, a plan should build the capacity of carers to provide support. While Carers NSW welcomes these key values, we have identified the following issues: • Treatment of carers by NDIS planners has varied and some carers feel their perspective has not been adequately taken into account; and • A separate conversation between the planner and the carer is only a possibility, not a formal entitlement for carers. Carer supports and services Carers of NDIS participants are likely to benefit from the funded supports provided to the participant, and the NDIS policy framework also allows for some supports to be funded especially to sustain informal care arrangements. However: • A large number of people with disability will not be eligible for the NDIS, and therefore they and their carers will not receive funded supports; • It is clear that the NDIS is not about carers, and that carers of NDIS participants are not entitled to referral or funded support in their own right through an NDIS package; • Carers of people with disability may no longer have access to Commonwealth funded carer supports outside the NDIS, since funding is being redistributed into the NDIS and Commonwealth Home Support Program; and • In NSW, people with disability who are not eligible for the NDIS, and all carers of people with disability, may no longer have access to State funded disability and carer supports in future, as the NSW Government will withdraw from providing disability services once the NDIS is fully rolled out. Carers NSW is highly concerned about the major gap in carer support that will result from current model and urgently calls upon the Commonwealth and NSW Governments to address this. Preparing and implementing the plan A number of capacity building initiatives are underway in NSW to prepare people with disability and their carers for the NDIS. However: • Not all carers are able to access these opportunities, and many carers still feel underprepared when they attend planning sessions; • Many carers feel that the NDIS has created more work for them, leaving them overwhelmed; • Many carers are finding NDIS plans difficult to read, understand and implement

Falling through the black hole horizon

We consider the fate of a small classical object, a "stick", as it falls through the horizon of a large black hole (BH). Classically, the equivalence principle dictates that the stick is affected by small tidal forces, and Hawking's quantum-mechanical model of BH evaporation makes essentially the same prediction. If, on the other hand, the BH horizon is surrounded by a "firewall", the stick will be consumed as it falls through. We have recently extended Hawking's model by taking into account the quantum fluctuations of the geometry and the classical back-reaction of the emitted particles. Here, we calculate the strain exerted on the falling stick for our model. The strain depends on the near-horizon state of the Hawking pairs. We find that, after the Page time when the state of the pairs deviates significantly from maximal entanglement (as required by unitarity), the induced strain in our semiclassical model is still parametrically small. This is because the number of the disentangled pairs is parametrically smaller than the BH entropy. A firewall does, however, appear if the number of disentangled pairs near the horizon is of order of the BH entropy, as implicitly assumed in previous discussions in the literature.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure

Neutron and X-ray diffraction studies on complex liquids

The above examples illustrate the extent to which present day neutron and X-ray diffraction methods are being used to determine interatomic structure in a wide range of liquid and amorphous systems. The determination of pair radial distribution functions not only offers a means to characterise different structures in liquids, but also provides theorists with information to construct realistic model potentials that can be used to calculate macroscopic behaviour and structural properties in regimes not currently accessible to experiment.\ud The well-established NDIS difference methods remain superior to all other methods for the determination of interatomic pairwise structure. The relatively new AXD (or DAS) difference methods have the potential to answer long-standing questions about the structure around species with mass number greater than about 30. However, the relatively low X-ray scattering power from light elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen etc. means that it will never be possible to resolve completely structures of biologically important liquids by X-ray methods alone. EXAFS spectroscopy has the distinct advantage over both diffraction techniques as it can be used to study local structure around particular species at high dilution. Therefore studies which combine reference data from AXD or NDIS, with extensive EXAFS data, are likely to be useful in studies of structure in regimes which prove difficult for AXD and NDIS. \ud It is clear that no one method will be sufficient to resolve structure at the required level of detail around all species in a complex liquid. Instead one must rely on a full complement of diffraction and other techniques including computer simulation to determine the complete atomic structure of a complex liquid or amorphous system.\ud On the technical front, the construction and commissioning of new neutron diffractometers with higher count rates, such as D20 and D4C at ILL, and GEM at ISIS with an optimised sample environment for work at non-ambient conditions, will enable new and more extensive research to be undertaken. Additionally, the new custom-built X-ray diffractometer for liquids proposed for the DIAMOND synchrotron being established at RAL will provide a much-needed boost for wide-ranging AXD and EXAFS investigations of complex liquids. \ud Besides the many studies of immediate interest suggested at the end of some sections, there are several investigations that will become feasible in the longer term as the technology develops. These include 1. the use of isotopes such as 12C and 13C and 33S and 32S which will enable detailed and extensive structural studies to be carried out on a wide range of biologically significant materials, and 2. the exploitation of higher neutron and X-ray count rates to facilitate real time experiments to investigate changes of structure as a chemical or biochemical reaction occurs. \ud The one strong theme which emerges from all the work described in this paper is that diffraction, especially that based on difference techniques, remains the best means to determine structure at atomic resolution in complex liquids

Neutron diffraction studies on liquids

The above examples serve to illustrate the extent to which neutron diffraction isotopic substitution methods have been used to determine interatomic structure in a wide range of liquid and amorphous systems. The direct determination of pair radial functions not only offers a means of characterising the different structures in liquids, but also provides theorists with information to construct more realistic model potentials which can be used to explore properties in regimes not currently accessible to experiment.\ud \ud It is anticipated that the NDIS methods will continue to be developed and applied to a wider range of systems. The construction and commissioning of new diffractometers with higher count rates, such as D20 and D4C at ILL, and GEM at ISIS with an optimised sample environment for work at non-ambient conditions will enable new and more extensive research to be undertaken. Besides the many problems of immediate interest suggested at the end of some sections, there are several investigations which will become feasible in the longer term as the technology develops. These include: (i) the use of isotopes such as 12C and 13C which will enable detailed and extensive structural studies to be carried out on a wide range of biologically significant materials, and (ii) the exploitation of higher count rates to investigate changes of structure as a chemical reaction occurs

Bounds on QCD Instantons from HERA

Signals for processes induced by QCD instantons are searched for in HERA data on the hadronic final state in deep-inelastic scattering. The maximally allowed fraction of instanton induced events is found at 95% confidence level to be on the percent level in the kinematic domain 0.0001<x<0.01 and 5 < Q-squared < 100 GeV-squared. The most stringent limits are obtained from the multiplicity distributions.Comment: 14 pages, latex, 9 figures as ps/ep