Recently, the Victorian Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) produced three resources for disability workers that offer best-practice advice in key areas of disability support. Each comes out of a recommendation from the Disability Commissioner that reliable information should be easily available to support workers. 

The resources, now available on the DFFH website, consist of a manual for preventing falls in group homes, a poster on detecting deteriorating health and what to do, and training modules for creating safe mealtimes for people with difficulty swallowing.    

To support these resources, NDS has produced three podcast episodes and accompanying videos in which experts discuss the topics in depth:   

• Falls Prevention: Professor Prue Morgan, Head of Physiotherapy at Monash University, talks about the importance of falls prevention, the consequences of falls, and the steps disability workers can take to reduce them.
• Safe Mealtimes: Professor Bronwyn Hemsley, Professor of Speech Pathology at the University of Technology, Sydney, discusses safe and enjoyable mealtimes and how to support NDIS participants who have difficulty swallowing.
• Deteriorating Health: Reece Adams, Head of the Centre for Developmental Disability Health, Monash Health, talks about deteriorating health in disability care settings, what disability workers should look for, and how they can respond.

You can watch or listen to the podcasts on our webpage, which also has links to the DFFH and other resources, or find them on Podbean, Spotify, IHeartRadio and GooglePlay.