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Results of the AFDO Disability Loop reader survey

In July 2017 AFDO Disability Loop asked our readers “what do you need?” We wanted your feedback and ideas about where Disability Loop should focus our efforts in the future. We had over 130 people complete our survey and give us feedback. We want to thank everyone for completing the survey. We will now take some time to talk about some of the important things you told us during the survey.

 

Information about you

31% of people who did our survey said that they were people with disability. We think this is a great number of people. In Australia, around 20% of people identify as having a disability. It is great that even more AFDO Disability Loop readers have disability themselves. 20% of you are also National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants. We think this number will increase next time we run a survey like this because the NDIS is becoming available in more areas over time.

50% of our readers live in Victoria. We think this is because the AFDO office is in Melbourne, and also because we have been running AFDO Disability Loop NDIS workshops around regional Victoria over the past year. It would be great to get even more people from around Australia to be involved with AFDO Disability Loop in the future.

 

What did you want from us?

Lots of you want AFDO Disability Loop to be even more busy and active! That means you want more information on our website, and our eNews to come out more often. A large number of you also want AFDO Disability Loop to run some more events for people who subscribe to us. Peer support is also important to you, so we will think about how we can connect AFDO Disability Loop readers together.

Your top three favourite topics that we talk about at AFDO Disability Loop include the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), disability advocacy, and how to organise your disability supports. Your three least favourite topics were early intervention, sexuality, and relationships.

 

The barriers that stop you participating in the community

We asked you what was making it hard for you to do things in your community. The three most common things that were making this hard were not having enough money, poor attitudes of people in the community, and finding it hard to access transport. It is interesting that all three of these things cannot be fixed entirely by the NDIS funding people through individual plans. However, with the NDIS people might get more employment opportunities, and be seen in the community more. Hopefully this will improve people’s attitudes. When we run this survey again in the future, we want these barriers to be less common.

11% of people who completed our survey said that there were no barriers they were worried about. This is great news! Hopefully this number will grow in the future as people with disability are supported to live better lives in their communities.

 

Future plans

AFDO, the organisation that runs Disability Loop, has helped other organisations that represent people with disability to run surveys about what their members want. We hope that this information will allow these organisations to improve the quality of services and information they provide to people with disability and their families. We’ll keep you in the loop about the results of these surveys in the future.

Thank you again for participating and for reading this news article! We really appreciate you being a supporter of AFDO Disability Loop.