In development

The scheme funds supports. Almost nothing measures whether life got better.

Hours delivered are counted to the minute. Whether the person is happier, safer or more in control of their own week is usually an anecdote in a progress note, if it is recorded at all. This assessment exists to put a defensible answer under that question, and to track it over years.

The shape of it

Three pillars, twenty domains, seventy anchor points

The structure took a long time to settle, and the reason it has three levels is that each one answers a different question: what broad area of life, what part of it specifically, and what concrete thing can actually be observed and talked about.

Screened clearDeep-assessedConcern → deep-diveConcern → manual follow-upNot screenedSafety trackGate active

Self9 domains · 47 anchors

Body & Physical Function21

Emotional Experience3

Cognitive Function4

Identity & Inner Life3

Communication2

Relational Capacity3

Agency & Self-Determination3

Daily Living & Self-Management6

Engagement2

Environment6 domains · 12 anchors

Home3

Neighbourhood & Community2

Financial Resources1

Services & Systems3

Work, Learning & Opportunity2

Digital & Information1

Relationships5 domains · 11 anchors

Family3

Intimate Partnership2

Friendships & Social1

Support Workers & Professionals3

Community & Belonging2

One assessment, part-way through: three pillars, the twenty domains inside them, and a square for each of the seventy anchors, coloured for how far this one has got with each. Hover, tap or tab any square to see which anchor it is. Fabricated demo participant.
How it runs

Supervised, not self-serve

This isn't a wellbeing survey emailed to someone to fill in on their own. A practitioner sets it up, oversees it and reviews what comes back — the participant answers the parts that are theirs to answer.

A practitioner opens it

The assessment is created and overseen by a professional who knows the person and is accountable for what it produces.

The participant answers

Questions are answered in the app, in the participant's own account, with a response scale designed to be usable by people with cognitive disability.

Screening finds what matters

A domain screen flags where to look more closely. Flags, deliberately, not scores — it points at things worth a conversation.

The practitioner reviews

Results are read, checked and turned into something useful for planning. Nothing is treated as a verdict on someone's life without a person having looked at it.

What it produces

Three different things, deliberately kept apart

Self-report and proxy-report are held as separate records and never merged. If a participant and the person speaking for them see it differently, that difference is the finding.

Comparable

An outcome measure you can track

A stable, repeatable read on wellbeing across the twenty domains, taken the same way each time — so the number means something when you compare this year to last.

Personal

Goal attainment

Goals scaled from much-worse to much-better than expected, agreed in advance and scored later. It captures progress that matters to this specific person and would be invisible in any standardised measure.

Practical

A needs and support picture

Where the pressure is, what's already helping, and what's left over once existing supports are accounted for. This is the part that feeds planning — what to actually do on Monday.

Wellbeing plotted over three cycles — baseline, check-in and review. Two lines run separately: the participant's own read, ending at 61, and her mother's proxy read, ending at 49. A dotted vertical marks where the item wording changed, labelled as re-baselined and not charted across as real change. Beside the chart, a note reads that the twelve-point gap has held across all three cycles and is worth a conversation, not a correction.

Self and proxy as two lines that are never averaged together, and a marker where the wording changed so a measurement artefact can't be read as progress. Illustrated with three cycles of demo data. Fabricated demo participant.

Three goals in the participant's own words — booking a weekend activity without being prompted, travelling to TAFE and back on the bus alone, and having a say in who comes to the house and when. Each is laid out as five written outcomes from minus two to plus two, agreed before the cycle, with the level reached this cycle highlighted: one above expected, one below, one as expected.

Goals written as five described outcomes before the cycle starts, then scored against what was agreed — including the one that didn't move. Fabricated demo participant.

Safety

Safety is a separate track, and it can't be averaged away

A person can be doing well across most of their life and still be in a situation that needs acting on this week. So safety concerns don't get folded into an overall score where a good average could hide them — they run on their own track, surface on their own, and a strong result elsewhere never suppresses them.

Where it's up to

Built in development, and not yet road-tested

What's built

The taxonomy is settled and clinically reviewed. The pieces are built and wired in our development environment — documents in, evidence extracted against the seventy anchors, the scoring engine, and the answering surface a participant completes with a practitioner reviewing it.

They have been tested as code. Nobody has yet sat down and driven the whole thing through the screens, which is a different test and the one that finds what is really wrong.

What's still coming

The reporting layer those last three screens show — turning a series of assessments into a trend a participant, a family and a funder can all read. Feeding what the assessment learns back into the participant's profile automatically, so a fact captured here doesn't have to be typed again there. And the pilot itself, which is where the design meets real people and some of it turns out to be wrong.

Get involved

If measuring outcomes is your problem too

We'd particularly like to hear from behaviour support practitioners, allied health professionals and support coordinators who've tried to evidence outcomes under the NDIS and want a better way to do it.