Your Doctor, Practice Nurse, Health Professional or Specialist will ask you a few questions to better understand the problem. They will then refer you to the right service to look at ways to help you better manage with your disability.

The assessment service might be at your local hospital or in the community – it might be with an Occupational therapist, Physiotherapist, Paediatric/School Therapist or a Health Professional that specialises in wheelchairs, communication, or vision.

You may need to wait for several weeks or months to be seen by the assessment service.

The Health Professional will assess how they can help you with the problems you are having with everyday tasks and activities because of your disability. They will ask questions; see how you do tasks and sometimes undertake an assessment to better understand the problem.

They may suggest changes and get you some simple equipment to try. They will talk to you about the equipment that might make things easier – the equipment might be quite simple and uncomplicated, or it might be specialised and need to be very carefully set up for you. 

If you want equipment to be provided on long-term loan to you by Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People , your Assessor (your Health Professional, who has accreditation to request funding) will send a request to us. We manage the budget on behalf of Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People for equipment and modifications for disabled and older people.

For simple equipment, like shower chairs, transfer aids, walking frames, we check that funding is available and then organise for the equipment to be sent to you or your assessor. The equipment might be delivered to you from our warehouse, it may come direct from the equipment supplier, or the Assessor might bring it to you.

Once we get the Assessor’s request, we organise for the equipment to be delivered to you.

If the equipment you need is more complicated  we work with your Assessor to make sure many equipment and support options have been considered. Requests for complicated and costly equipment might mean that we help the Assessor find other similar equipment to trial.

Our Professional Advisory team can provide support to the Assessor, by phone, email, in person or in a clinic. Sometimes we need to ask Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People to review the funding request.

Sometimes requests for funding will not be supported – your Assessor and Accessable will tell you why.

Once we get the Assessor's request, Accessable will organise for the equipment to be delivered to you. 

Your Assessor sets up the equipment for you and shows you how to use it. Sometimes a Technician or an equipment supplier will help. You can try the equipment and see if it is helpful and makes tasks easier. If it doesn’t help, your Assessor can ask us to try a different item of equipment.

Once you know that the equipment is useful your Assessor will let us know. The equipment will be on loan to you for as long as you need it. Your Assessor will tell you how to look after the equipment and what to do if it needs repairs or no longer suits you.

Equipment can be tried for up to a month, but it sometimes takes longer.    

Equipment is owned by the Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People and is on loan to you for as long as you need it. Accessable will continue to repair, service and replace it, and when it is no longer needed, we will collect it.

When the equipment no longer meets your needs and you need something different you can contact the assessment service or ask your GP to refer you for a new assessment.