by Dr Kylie Henderson, Founder & Managing Director of Humanity Health Group
In disability care, we ask a lot of questions early on.
What’s the functional capacity?
What funding do they have?
What supports are they eligible for?
These questions matter and, in many cases, they’re necessary to get someone the right care.
But after more than two decades working across mental health and disability systems, I’ve come to believe there’s one question that matters more than all of them: what matters to this person?
It sounds like a simple shift, but it changes everything about how care is planned and delivered. Meaningful outcomes for someone with disability are rarely just about ‘receiving services.’ They’re things like independence, participation in community life, finding or keeping a job, building friendships, financial independence, or being able to remain in their own home.
When we genuinely understand what someone is working toward, something powerful happens across the care team; it allows different allied health clinicians to collaborate toward the same outcome, rather than each operating within their own discipline, ticking their own boxes, with nobody connecting the dots.
Much of the time, real progress happens not in individual sessions, but in the alignment between them.
The challenge is that systems don’t always make this easy. Funding structures, eligibility criteria and compliance requirements can quietly shift our focus toward what’s fundable before we’ve even asked what’s meaningful. None of this is anyone’s fault, and it often reflects how complex systems evolve.
As clinicians, it’s part of our job to pull the focus back to the person, again and again, even when the system pulls us elsewhere.
The best outcomes start with someone’s own aspirations
The best outcomes I’ve seen in disability care have always started with understanding someone’s goals, their aspirations, the life they actually wanted to build. The funding, the supports, the clinical input (what worked and what hasn’t)… all of this exists purely to help get them there.
This is why, if we want better outcomes in disability care, we need to keep asking the right question, even when it’s not the easiest one to answer.
That question is, “what actually matters to this person?”
That’s where great care begins.
