online workshop

Balancing Risk and Rights: Duty of Care in Contemporary NDIS Practice

What do you do when keeping someone “safe” may mean limiting their right to choose? This 2 hour workshop unpacks how to honour both duty of care and dignity of risk with confidence, clarity and with strong legal grounding.

Registration

Flexible rescheduling

Change up to 4 hours before.

Why take this course?

Because doing the right thing isn’t always straightforward.

You want to deliver person-centred supports. You also want to stay compliant. But when participants want to make decisions that seem risky, how do you strike the right balance?

Most providers understand the principles of dignity of risk and duty of care. But in practice, the boundaries can get murky. And when that uncertainty is layered with tighter plans, compliance pressure and rising participant expectations, it’s easy for teams to lean toward becoming more risk-averse.

This workshop is designed to close that gap. It offers a practical, legally grounded framework for navigating the messy middle, where safety, choice, funding and compliance collide. You’ll leave with tools to make more confident, defensible decisions and lead a more rights-based approach across your service.

Led by a human rights lawyer, formerly a senior Policy Director at the Disability Royal Commission and DSC Principal Consultants, this is your roadmap to doing risk, dignity and duty of care better.


What you’ll gain

  • A clear understanding of your legal and ethical obligations under duty of care

  • Understanding of common myths around Duty of Care, and how to bust them in your own organisation

  • Tools to support dignity of risk decisions in line with standards and NDIA guidelines 

  • Scenarios and scripts for responding to real-world tensions (e.g. spending funds compliantly, safety, family pressure)

  • Confidence to document legally defensible decisions that honour participant rights

  • A practical decision-making lens to use across your organisation

  • Strategies to lead a shift toward risk-positive, rights-based culture


Who’s it for?

  • This workshop is for anyone working in NDIS services who helps make decisions about risk and safety. It’s ideal for team leaders, support coordinators, recovery coaches, allied health, managers and frontline staff.

  • If you’ve ever felt unsure about how to balance participant choice with your responsibilities, this session is for you.


What’s included?

  • 2-hour virtual workshop via Zoom

  • PDF copy of the slides

  • A self-audit tool to help providers assess whether their supports and systems align with a Dignity of Risk approach, to identify opportunities for improvement

Sessions

Your timezone

$340.00

$340.00

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FAQ

Facilitators

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Emily Cukalevski

Emily is a lawyer, policy strategist and reform nerd who’s spent her career working to make rights real for people with disability. She led work on autonomy, decision-making and restrictive practices at the Disability Royal Commission. She has worked at the UN and the Australian Human Rights Commission, and now heads up Disability Rights Connect.

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Rob Woolley

Our very own Woolly Mammoth, pulls up last in the alphabetical rankings but always gets a place on the DSC podium for combining curiosity with smarts. He knows so much about the NDIS it is scary. Rob lives a personal commitment to sharing his knowledge with an endgame of people with disability in control. Combining lived experience of the early childhood intervention pathway with professional experience of the realities of provider life - he has consistently shown the inability to hold down a real job. His roles in the disability sector have covered direct support work, project management, business development, consulting, ILC-funded advocacy roles and owner-operator of a registered and then unregistered provider (but the thing he is best at is being a very present dad). If you want a consultant or trainer in your corner you will be looking high and low to do better than our Rob.

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Sally Coddington

Sally, our NDIS wonderwoman and 'pocket rocket,' combines humour with a wealth of NDIS knowledge, intellect, and energy. With extensive experience in financial and human services across B2B and B2C sectors, she’s a dynamic trainer, Certified Practicing Marketer, Harvard Alumni and passionate advocate for disability rights.

For over 15 years, she has been a key figure in the disability sector, currently as a Director of Hunter Circles. Sally has served on boards like The Centre for Universal Design, Business Hunter, and Community Disability Alliance Hunter (CDAH), and contributed to the NSW Disability Council. 

Sally's personal experience deepens her professional insights; her daughter Nicky, an NDIS participant for four years, passed away in 2018. This unique blend of experience shapes her understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the NDIS business landscape.