Potential Service Disruptions at The Disability Trust due to COVID

The rapidly increasing case numbers of COVID in the community is having a significant impact on essential services across our community. The Disability Trust is not immune from these impacts.

Over the coming weeks we know we are likely to see service disruptions due to staffing shortages in our programs. We are proud of our diligent and professional staff at The Disability Trust who are committed to providing exceptional services. However, given the current situation with COVID we are seeing increasing situations where our people are unable to come to work.

We wish to reassure you that we are working diligently to do all we can to minimise disruptions to our programs and services but unfortunately due to the numbers of people affected and the unpredictable nature of the situation we do have limited control over the extent of these service disruptions.

At times over the coming weeks we may need to take a range of actions in consultation with our staff to respond to these unprecedented staffing shortages including, but not limited to:

• Postponing, cancelling or changing our services (e.g. combining services, increasing group supports, reducing 1:1 supports),
• Moving available staff between services to meet service needs,
• Increasing overtime for available staff,
• Bringing in unfamiliar personnel from other programs or regions to support essential services.

Please bear with us as we, along with other service providers in our community, experience these unavoidable service disruptions as COVID becomes more widespread in our community. I wish to reassure you that we are working hard to continue to provide a high-quality service under these challenging conditions and we look forward to a time in the near future where we return to a more predictable and normalised situation.

Your understanding is greatly appreciated and we look forward to working through this time to keep everyone in our community safe and supported.