With the NDIS rapidly shifting toward evidence-based funding decisions, many Support Coordinators, Recovery Coaches, and clinicians are finding themselves under increasing pressure to justify support recommendations with clear, functional evidence; not just diagnoses or self-reported challenges.
The reality is that many participants struggle to demonstrate the true extent of their daily functional support needs within short assessments, clinic appointments, or paper-based reports alone. As funding scrutiny increases, this can leave coordinators and therapists fighting harder for supports with limited observable evidence to back recommendations.
•Real-world observation •Stronger functional evidence •Better planning conversations
We provide participants with a structured, real-world environment where their genuine functional capacity, daily living challenges, social participation, emotional regulation, and support needs can be consistently observed over time; not just inferred from diagnosis.
This gives Support Coordinators, Occupational Therapists, Recovery Coaches, families, and participants something critically important: clearer, objective evidence based on actual functional performance.
Instead of relying solely on clinical assumptions or participant self-reporting, planning conversations can be supported by documented observations, behavioural trends, participation data, and real-world support responses.
In an environment where “functional evidence” is becoming essential for securing and sustaining supports, our hub helps provide a clearer picture of participant needs, while also giving participants the opportunity to demonstrate their strengths, support requirements, challenges, and capacity within a structured and supportive environment.
From mid-2026, the NDIS planning process will start changing to include a support needs assessment. This means planning will focus more on the participant's actual support needs in daily life, not just their diagnosis.
The assessment will look at how a participant manages everyday activities, including communication, decision-making, personal care, social interaction, emotional regulation, community access and safety.
It will become more important to show how a participant functions in everyday settings, not just what their diagnosis is. Evidence should describe what support is needed, how often it is needed , and what risks may occur if the right support is not in place.
The NDIA has adopted the I-CAN v6 tool as the starting point for developing the new support needs assessment approach. It is designed to assess disability support needs in a more consistent and person-centered way.
Participants, families, guardians and Support Coordinators should start thinking about how to collect clear evidence of what support is actually needed. Structured observation in real-life activities can help show the level of prompting, supervision, assistance, behavioural support and risk management required.
