Will Support at Home or the NDIS fund my footwear?
Support at Home providers and NDIS plan managers can buy footwear on behalf of clients, but the buying organisations are responsible for determining whether purchases are eligible for funding. Just Comfort Shoes is not a registered Support at Home or NDIS service provider.
If you would like your organisation to pay for your shoes, please advise us on entering our store. We will need personal details including an email address for any organisation that needs a copy of the invoice from us and your podiatrist or other health practitioner if you would like us to provide them with details of the footwear you want.
Our opinion on what footwear may suit is not a guarantee that it will be funded.
We charge a Case Processing Fee of $16.50 (incl GST) for purchases involving invoicing of an organisation prior to payment. This covers information collection, invoice creation, remittance advice processing, bank deposit processing, and, where necessary, invoice adjustments and emailing of footwear information to health practitioners.
We do not enter into contracts with buyers other than the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Invoices will be cancelled in cases where buyers demand that we change how we do business or where invoiced organisations have impractical or unreasonable requirements. For this reason we do not invoice Ozcare, Sunshine Coast Plan Management, Australian Unity, MyHomecare, Anglicare, HomeMade Support or Instacare. Customers seeking footwear from us whose funding is managed by these organisations will need to either buy from us directly or switch to a different provider.
Customers buying this way must accept that: (1) their case will be placed in a queue of administrative work; (2) we do not give preferential priority to customers who want their footwear by a certain date; (3) footwear is not released until after we receive payment; (4) organisations often take up to a month to pay; (5) we cannot guarantee or estimate a timeframe for sending of the invoice, receiving of the payment or issuing of the footwear; (6) contacting us unnecessarily for updates delays us in fulfilling customer orders; (7) we prioritise DVA Medical Grade Footwear over invoiced purchases based on contractual obligations to DVA.
Support at Home
The list of product types included in the Support at Home program includes "shoes and boots" that are needed to optimise a person’s functioning or manage the person’s disability or age-related functional decline. They are included as "low risk" products in the list, meaning no prescription is required by the Support at Home rules. However, registered providers who are funding the footwear may require a health practitioner's prescription or recommendation to satisfy their own responsibility to ensure the products' suitability.
The NDIS
Only plan-managed and self-managed NDIS clients can obtain their footwear from us. NDIA-managed ("agency-managed") clients can spend their NDIS funds only with registered NDIS providers.
The NDIS funds footwear only that is specifically for disability and often requires a relevant health practioner's recommendation. The eligible footwear is more narrowly defined than that of Support at Home.
NDIS eligibility is based on "custom-made", "modified" or "adaptive" items specifically needed for disability. Of these, we provide only "adaptive" footwear, which for NDIS purposes means footwear needed for disability that has been manufactured to cater for particular health needs.
The shoes we consider "adaptive" can be found by clicking on an "Adaptive Footwear" tag in our website search filters or viewing our Adaptive Footwear page. Our opinion on which of our stocked styles are adaptive is not a guarantee that the footwear qualifies for NDIS funding at all, nor that the classification of a particular footwear style as "adaptive" implies its eligibility for NDIS funding for a particular participant.
