Kate – Awesome Advocate
Supporting People with Disability is more than frontline support.
It takes a team of people like Kate to advocate for their voices and empower them to live safe and happy lives.
As a Quality Lead at Interchange WA, her job is to both proactively prevent and follow up on incidents and unsafe practices, reporting directly to the NDIS Quality & Safeguards Commission. Kate approaches her work with a person-centred mindset and applies empathy and understanding to get the best outcomes possible for our customers.
Because of Kate’s exceptional commitment to her role and the people she supports, she’s the latest iThink You Are Awesome winner.
Person-Centred Support
Kate has been working at Interchange WA for six years, and became a Quality Lead three years ago, leaving her position as a Team Leader. The change was motivated by a simple belief:
“We should be empowering those who cannot speak, and those who cannot speak up.”
Her day-to-day isn’t for the faint of heart. It involves documenting and reporting cases of injury, abuse, neglect, and restrictive practices. She sees the most difficult elements of managing people’s supports. Through her reporting, she makes recommendations to improve the lives of affected customers, advises changes to Support Worker’s practices and provides proactive measures to prevent further problems for our customers.
She always considers the person behind the case. Their history and current circumstances, as well as their own choices, all contribute to a resolution. Especially in difficult cases, she digs deeper for the reasons the incident occurred and seeks out ways to prevent similar incidents in the future.
For example, some customers have had multiple ongoing behavioural incidents. But when Kate looked deeper, she found that the problem came from their home environment exacerbating them. From there, she listened to the customers and advocated for them to receive housing supports that better fit their needs. Whether those needs were better accessibility for their disabilities or space away from their families. The success of her advocacy has consistently led to improved quality of life for customers and reduced incidents involving them.
Empowering Choice
She says that about half of incidents come from people reacting poorly to a customer. These are cases where the customer is not at fault, or the customer was involved in an inciting incident that was not de-escalated properly. She believes that education and empathy are key to minimising and avoiding incidents, so that People with Disability are treated with dignity.
To do this. Kate advocates for an active support model with trauma-informed practice. One that gives people the tools to understand People with Disability, support their decision-making, and de-escalate situations as they emerge.
One of the big steps towards empowering people with disability is giving the people around them to empower them.
Of Interchange WA’s values, Kate values Empowerment the most. Where many people see someone as their problems, she sees the person. She believes all people deserve choice and control, and that preconceptions that intellectual disabilities prevent people from making choices are incorrect.
“Even if they can’t speak, you can still listen to a person. They can still make decisions.”
iThink You Are Awesome
Kate’s own happiness comes from her daughters. The passion that Kate has for supporting vulnerable people has shone through and affected their lives too, shaping their choices and career paths. Both of them now follow in Kate’s footsteps by working in Human Services.
Kate hopes to one day live off the grid. But while she’s still on the grid, Interchange WA is grateful to have her, because we think she’s Awesome.
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