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A disability advocate says three men being left in a Tasmanian hospital for months because they can't secure extra NDIS support to manage at home is 'inhumane and unfair'.
Wed 16 Sep 2026 at 5:09pmSupport services say the men remain in hospital because their requests for extra NDIS home supports had been rejected. Three men are stuck in a hospital in Tasmania because they can't secure extra NDIS support, a support service says.
A disability advocate says it's an issue that could arise after changes to the NDIS were recently legislated. The federal government says it has "made good progress on hospital discharge, but challenges remain". Three men stuck in a Tasmanian hospital for months could go home if the National Disability Insurance Scheme provided more assistance, a support service says. North West Support Services general manager Neal Rodwell told 936 ABC Hobart he was "gravely, gravely concerned" for their wellbeing.
"If the situation went on and on for more months, I think there's a very real risk that people would lose their lives. " The men declined to be interviewed, but their plight is central to an ongoing argument between state and federal governments. Mr Rodwell has known two of them for more than 30 years, and the other for about 25 years, and, without relatives, said his service was "the closest thing they've got to family".
He said they had been at the North West Regional Hospital for three months, four months and five months. The three men have been at the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie for a number of months. Mr Rodwell said the men had been cleared by hospital allied health professionals, and while one had received approval for additional equipment, a request by all three for more hours of personal support through their NDIS plans had been rejected.
"It's an incredible loss for those people," he said. "They've lost their familiar home environments, they've lost their physical activity, they've lost stimulating social interaction with people who know them. "They need to go home. "Disability Advocacy Network Australia chief executive Emma Bennison said that it was a far too common scenario, and unacceptable that people with disability were "essentially institutionalised".
"This is a really significant issue across the country, and it definitely needs urgent attention. People should not have to be stuck in a hospital just because they can't get the support they need," she said,Emma Bennison wants political leaders to look beyond "dollars and cents" when making decisions related to the NDIS.
The federal government recently made sweeping changes to the NDIS, which costs more than $50 billion annually, aiming to make it more sustainable and crack down on fraud.
"The warning I would sound is that we are going to see much more of this as the reforms roll out,""I would like to see the humanity be front and centre in these conversations because I think we'd get very different outcomes if that was the case," she said. State governments are responsible for hospitals, while the NDIS and aged care sit with the Commonwealth, which has often been a source of tension between the two jurisdictions.
"We have many, many more patients like this that are stranded in hospitals either because they're awaiting NDIS support or indeed aged care support," Tasmania's health minister Bridget Archer told 936 ABC Hobart. State health minister Bridget Archer is continuing to lobby the Federal Government over the issue of bed block.
"We continue to care for them in the hospitals because people need to be cared for, but they no longer need to be in hospital; they are ready to go home. " Ms Archer said that while the state would continue supporting these people, the federal government needed to do more.
"What we are saying is this is your responsibility, and you can't just neglect it and push it to the state because that has real consequences,"A spokesperson for NDIS Minister Jenny McAllister said the government could not comment on individual circumstances. They said since coming into power, they had more than halved the number of days it took to discharge an NDIS patient, which sat at 15 days.
They did not respond to a question about whether NDIS changes risked leaving some regional Australians behind.
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