SIL Handbook Part 4: The First 90 Days

Where this chapter picks up

Part 1 explained what Supported Independent Living is. Part 2 covered eligibility and the evidence the NDIA reads. Part 3 was about finding a home and touring it. This chapter is about the three months after the boxes are unpacked, which almost nobody prepares for and which sets how the next few years go.

The reason to treat 90 days as a distinct period is simple. Everything in a new home is provisional at the start: the roster is a first draft, the staff do not know the person yet, the housemates are strangers, and the routine has been designed on paper by people who have not yet watched it happen. Treating that as settled is the mistake. Treating it as a build is the whole job.

Week one: keep it small

The instinct is to make the first week special. Resist it. The most useful first week is a boring one: same wake time, same meals, same two or three activities, minimal visitors. Novelty is exhausting, and the person is already dealing with the largest change in their life.

Bring the household objects that carry routine, not just the sentimental ones. The particular mug. The specific blanket. The bedside lamp that has always been there. These are not decoration, they are the anchors that make a strange room readable.

Family should visit, and family should also leave. A parent who stays until 10pm every night for a fortnight is making the transition harder for everyone, including themselves. Agree a visiting pattern before move-in day, write it down, and expect to renegotiate it at week three when it turns out to be either too much or not enough.

One practical thing to do in the first few days: walk the house with the team and confirm they know where everything is. Medication storage, the emergency information, spare continence supplies, the charger for the communication device. Handover documents are often complete and unread.

Weeks two to six: the roster meets reality

A roster of care is a prediction. Real life corrects it, and the correction is the point. What tends to surface in this window: mornings take longer than allowed for, the evening shift is thinner than the evening needs, appointments were not built in, and one particular day of the week does not work at all.

Keep a simple log. Date, what happened, what was needed, what was available. Not a complaint file, a record. Six weeks of that is worth more at a plan conversation than any amount of recollection, and it is the same discipline that makes a request for extra overnight support credible.

Ask the provider for a review meeting at the six-week mark and put it in the diary before move-in. Do not wait to be offered one. Six weeks is late enough that patterns are visible and early enough that changing them is not a fight about precedent. Our explanation of how support hours are worked out is worth rereading before that meeting, because it will be about hours.

This is also when the household starts to form. Housemates who were polite in week one begin having actual opinions about the television, the kitchen and the bathroom schedule. That is healthy. What matters is whether staff treat it as a problem to suppress or a normal negotiation between adults to support.

Weeks six to twelve: the quiet risks

Three things reliably go wrong in the second half of the first 90 days, and all three are easier to catch than to repair.

The first is drift in the support plan. The written plan says one thing, the actual practice has evolved into another, and nobody updated the document. Six months later a new worker follows the document and gets it wrong. Ask for the plan to be reissued at the 90-day mark reflecting what is genuinely happening.

The second is the disappearance of the outside life. Day programme attendance slips, the swimming stops, the friend from the old area is not visited any more, and the person's world quietly shrinks to the house. It happens without anyone deciding it, usually because transport is harder than expected. Count the hours spent outside the home in week ten and compare them with the plan.

The third is money. The first three months in a new home always cost more than expected: household goods, a bond, moving costs, more transport, the extra supports around settling in. If the plan is going to run short, this is the period that does it, and knowing early gives you options that knowing in month nine does not.

Rent, agreements and the boundary you keep

Check that the two agreements are actually two. Your tenancy or occupancy agreement covers the house. Your service agreement covers the support. They should be separate documents, and ideally the landlord and the support provider are separate parties, so that changing one does not threaten the other.

Confirm what you are being charged and against what. Rent, the board contribution for food and household costs, utilities, and the NDIS-funded supports are four different things, and they should be legible on paper. Our article on who pays for what in SIL sets out the standard split.

If something looks wrong, raise it in writing during the first 90 days rather than living with it. Charges accepted quietly for three months are much harder to query in month four.

What good looks like at day 90

A reasonable set of markers, none of which require anything unusual from a provider. The person can describe their own week. Staff know the small things without being told, the food they will not eat, the sound they cannot stand, the time of day they need space. The roster has changed at least once since move-in, because a roster that has never changed has never been examined.

The support plan matches what is actually done. Family visits have settled into a pattern nobody resents. Something outside the house happens at least twice a week. There has been at least one disagreement in the household that was resolved rather than managed away.

And the person has said, in whatever way they say things, that this is where they live. Not where they were placed. Where they live.

If you are still at the earlier stages of this, the rest of the handbook starts with Part 1, and our current homes and vacancies are listed on the find a home page. Part 5 will deal with what happens when something needs to change: raising concerns, and moving on if it comes to that.