Meal
Preparation and/or Delivery
As Per:
What meal preparation supports might we fund?
- Your disability might mean you can’t shop, cook or clean up after preparing your meal. We may fund the cost of a support worker to help you shop for your food, prepare your meals, and to clean up afterwards.
- Your disability might mean you have trouble planning your meals or following multi-step instructions. If you can re-heat your meals, we may fund a support worker to help you shop for food and pre-prepare some meals for the week. We may also pay for delivery of pre- prepared ingredients.
What else do we think about?
To work out whether the cost of paying someone to help with meal preparation is reasonable and necessary, we’ll look at the information you give us against the NDIS funding criteria.
While the NDIS can provide reasonable and necessary funding for the cost of meal preparation and the cost of home delivery, we won’t fund supports that aren’t directly related to your disability. For example, if you want healthy meals delivered because you have a poor diet or need a different diet for reasons that aren’t to do with your disability, we wouldn’t be able to fund this.
We won’t fund meal preparation and delivery if you only need these supports because of health issues such as:
- weight loss
- food allergies
- diabetes
- cardiovascular (heart) disease
- kidney disease
- polycystic ovary syndrome
- irritable bowel syndrome.
These are not usually related to your disability and are better funded through the health system or through mainstream supports. You should discuss this with your doctor.
How can you use your funding flexibly?
The NDIS may provide reasonable and necessary funding for the cost of meal preparation. Your core supports are flexible and you may decide to use that funding to pay for the preparation and delivery of pre-prepared meals in certain circumstances. It is up to you to manage your funding to cover your expenses for the length of your plan. You are only able to use your core support funding flexibly for meal preparation if this was specified in your plan.
