Supported Independent Living (SIL)

What SIL actually is

Supported Independent Living (SIL) is the support a person receives in the home they live in — help with the everyday things that make a home run, delivered by a rostered team of support workers rather than a single visiting worker.

PowerCare holds NDIS registration group 115 (Daily Tasks / Shared Living), which is the registration SIL is delivered under.

SIL is the support, not the house. This is the single most confused thing in the whole NDIS, so it is worth being blunt about it.

SIL is not SDA — and PowerCare does not provide SDA

SDA (Specialist Disability Accommodation) is the building. It is funded separately, provided by different organisations, and PowerCare does not provide it. We are not a landlord and we do not own or supply housing.

SIL is the support delivered inside a home. That is what we do.

A participant can have SIL in an SDA property, in a private rental, in a share house, or in a home a family owns. If a provider is offering you a house and support as one inseparable package, ask why — because under the NDIS they are two different things, and you are allowed to choose them separately.

Who SIL is for

SIL is for participants who need support available across the day and, usually, overnight — because the support they need is not a one-hour visit, it is the shape of the whole day.

That includes participants with high clinical needs. We take SIL participants with tracheostomies, PEG or NG feeding, catheters, complex bowel care, severe dysphagia, complex wounds and subcutaneous injections — because PowerCare holds registration group 104 with Practice Standards Module 1 alongside its SIL registration.

That combination is the whole point. A SIL provider without Module 1 cannot deliver the clinical supports, so the participant either gets refused, or gets a second provider bolted on. We do not have that problem.

Who delivers the support

Day-to-day SIL support is delivered by support workers, rostered so that the same small team keeps returning.

Where a participant’s plan includes high-intensity supports, those supports are delivered either by registered nurses, or by support workers with high-intensity training working under registered-nurse supervision — depending on the participant’s clinical needs and circumstances. The registered nurse trains the roster against the participant’s own plan and is the escalation point when something changes.

Where a participant has a behaviour support plan, our workers implement that plan as their behaviour support practitioner has written it. We do not write these plans — see behaviour support.

What a day in a SIL home looks like

It looks like a home, and that is the standard we hold it to.

Morning: workers support the people who live there to get up, get clean, get dressed, take medications, and eat — including any clinical supports the plan sets out, delivered inside the routine rather than as an interruption to it.

Daytime: people go where they were going — work, day programs, appointments, community, the shops, nowhere in particular. SIL support does not mean staying home. Where community access is funded separately, it is coordinated so the roster actually lines up with real life.

Evening: dinner, the household running — cleaning, laundry, shopping, bills, the ordinary maintenance of living somewhere. Participants do as much of this themselves as they can and want to. Building capacity is not a slogan here; it is the difference between a home and an institution.

Night: overnight support is delivered as the participant’s funded roster specifies — active overnight, or sleepover, depending on what has been assessed and funded.

The things that actually go wrong in SIL, and what we do about them

Staff churn. A new face every shift is exhausting and, for someone with complex clinical needs, unsafe. We build small consistent rosters and train them against the participant’s specific plan.

Housemate mismatch. Who someone lives with matters more than almost anything else about a SIL home. Participants and families should be part of that decision, not informed of it.

The clinical support falling through the gap. This is the one that puts people in hospital. Holding both the SIL and the high-intensity registrations is how we close that gap.

Nobody telling the family anything. Families should not have to find out from the person themselves that something changed.

How SIL gets funded

SIL funding sits in the Core supports budget of an NDIS plan and is usually based on a roster of care — an assessed picture of how much support a person needs, and when. It typically requires evidence from the participant’s treating and support team, and it is quoted and agreed before support begins.

If you are not sure whether your plan has SIL funding in it, or whether the funded roster matches what is actually needed, bring the plan to the first call and we will read it with you honestly — including if the answer is that the plan does not currently fund what is being asked for.

How to start

Call us. Tell us who the participant is, what the clinical needs are, what the current living situation is, and what has not worked before.

We will tell you whether we can deliver the support, what it would look like, and when it could realistically start. High-intensity supports need workers trained against the specific plan before the first shift, so we will give you an honest start date on the first call rather than a comfortable one.

If we cannot do it, we will tell you on that call.