What NZ disability-service evaluations actually find.
Every developmental evaluation of a DSS-funded service ends in a published summary report. Read one and you have an anecdote. Read all of them and the sector’s documentation challenges have a shape. We read all of them — this page is the shape.
Standing analysis · updated as DSS publishes · every figure carries its source and as-at date
154 published reports. One window that matters.
Disability Support Services publishes an evaluation summary report for each developmental evaluation of the services it funds. As at 11 August 2026, that listing carried 154 summary report files spanning evaluations from 2015 to 2025.
The analysis below uses the most recent three years — the current template and regime: 41 distinct summary documents covering 19 providers, for evaluations completed July 2022 – July 2025. Together they record 237 individual findings, reducing to 164 distinct findings once near-identical findings repeated across a provider’s sister houses on the same date are counted once.
Counting notes — because counting honestly is the point
- Several documents summarise multiple homes (one covers eleven, another eight), so underlying house evaluations exceed 41.
- One listed report is a byte-identical duplicate of another under a different link; it is counted once.
- One undated report on the listing is a January 2021 evaluation and sits outside the window.
- Two documents in the window record no findings at all. That happens, and it’s worth knowing it happens.
Three machines, different rules.
Three different processes examine a disability provider’s quality. Conflating them produces bad decisions — a finding in one tells you something, but not everything, about how you’d fare in another.
HealthCERT certification audits
Conducted by designated auditing agencies (DAAs) against Ngā Paerewa NZS 8134:2021, for providers required to be certified under the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act.
DSS developmental evaluations
The regime this page’s corpus records: evaluations of DSS-funded services, reported in published summaries, rated on a three-tier scale — good practice, development desirable, action required.
The DSS Enhanced Audit Programme
New from 2026, delivered by KPMG under contract to MSD. Different scope, different cohorts, different rules again — timeline below.
A handful of systems generate most findings.
Most findings in the corpus come from a small number of documentation systems — the same ones, provider after provider. Not because providers are careless, but because these are the systems where paperwork and daily practice have to stay synchronised, and synchronisation drifts.
Documents (of the 41 in the window) in which each system drew at least one finding. Source: published summaries, scored 11 Aug 2026.
- Goals into plans — the single most common engine. A person’s goals are recorded, but the plan doesn’t carry them into actions, or nothing tracks progress against them. The goal exists; the paper trail from goal to plan to review doesn’t.
- Home and financial agreements — missing, outdated, or not itemising what the person actually pays for. The document everyone signed at entry, years ago, describing an arrangement that has since changed.
- Workforce records and training — orientation records, training matrices, professional-development trails. The training often happened; the record that it happened is the gap.
- Restraint documentation — registers out of step with policy, reviews not documented on cycle. High-stakes and closely evaluated, so drift here converts to findings fast.
- Personal money records — ledgers, receipts, reconciliation of money a service handles for a person. A smaller engine, but it recurs.
The first three between them appear in over half of all documents in the window.
Where the ratings actually land.
The 2025 evaluation template rates twelve domains on the three-tier scale. Across the 35 documents in the window that carry a rating table (all 2025 evaluations; where an evaluator split-rates a cell, it is recorded as “mixed”, not forced to a tier):
| Domain | Good practice | Development desirable | Action required | Mixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| My identity | 26 | 4 | 0 | 5 |
| My authority | 14 | 10 | 3 | 8 |
| My connections | 31 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| My wellbeing | 24 | 3 | 7 | 1 |
| My contribution | 34 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| My support | 34 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| My resources | 27 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Organisational health | 34 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Value for money | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Equity | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Enabling Good Lives | 28 | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| Overall rating | 15 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Ratings are encoded as cell shading in the published documents; extracted and verified against the source files. Source: 35 published 2025-template summaries, 11 Aug 2026.
- “My authority” and “My wellbeing” carry nearly all the sub-good ratings. Authority is where choice and control live — goal-setting, agreements, decision-making. Wellbeing is where medication and restraint live. These are exactly the domains the failure engines above feed.
- “Value for money” and “Equity” have never been rated below good in this corpus. Whatever an evaluation is stress-testing, it isn’t those.
- Only 15 of 35 services rated good across the board. A clean sheet is the minority outcome. If your last evaluation had a development area or two, you are the median, not the problem.
The quarter no document can carry.
An honest number nobody else has published: of the 164 distinct findings in the window, 40 — about 24% — could not have been found in a provider’s documents at all.
They are things an evaluator sees or hears on the day: support delivered for rather than with people; how community participation actually feels to the person; the staff desk in the dining room; a support need spotted in the room, not in the file. No policy review or document check — anyone’s — can surface them, because they don’t live in documents.
Classification of all 164 distinct findings by evidence type. Source: published summaries, scored 11 Aug 2026.
The practical reading: roughly three-quarters of what evaluations find is visible in your paperwork before the evaluator arrives — and is therefore fixable before the evaluator arrives. The remaining quarter is about practice, and no amount of documentation polish reaches it. Budget your preparation accordingly — and be sceptical of anyone who implies a document review covers everything.
The Enhanced Audit Programme timeline.
The corpus above records the evaluation regime as it has been. From 2026, a new machine starts alongside it. Cohort counts below are provisional — MSD and KPMG were still reconciling them as at August 2026 — and each carries its source.
Programme contracted
MSD contracts KPMG to deliver the DSS Enhanced Audit Programme ($7.8m). Source: the MSD–KPMG agreement, released under the OIA, 2026.
Type 1 — organisational audits, uncertified providers
Organisational audits of the 24 residential providers not certified under the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act. Scope includes business viability — a domain with no counterpart in the corpus above: across all 164 distinct findings, not one is a direct financial-viability finding. Providers have no published precedent for what a viability finding looks like. Source: the released agreement; cohort figure per DSS Quality Assurance correspondence, Aug 2026 — provisional.
Type 2 — site audits, small group homes
Site audits across the uncertified (≤4-bed) group-home estate: 1,292 homes across 67 providers — 324 homes with the 24 uncertified-provider entities, 968 with 43 certified providers. Source: DSS Quality Assurance correspondence, Aug 2026 — provisional.
Types 3 & 4 — seven further service lines (indicative)
The programme expands to roughly 117 further providers: Home & Community Support (55), Child Development (20), NASC (15), Choice in Community Living (13), Individualised Funding Hosts (11), Equipment & Modification (2), Behaviour Support (1). Source: the RFP appendix within the OIA release; counts are Aug 2025 indicative, not current state.
Every number traces to a public source.
- Corpus: all evaluation summary reports published at disabilitysupport.govt.nz, harvested 11 August 2026 (154 files, 2015–2025); analysis window July 2022 – July 2025 (41 documents, 19 providers).
- Programme facts: the MSD–KPMG Enhanced Audit Services Agreement and RFP, released under the Official Information Act (2026); DSS Quality Assurance correspondence with Support Ready (August 2026). Cohort counts are provisional and labelled as such.
- What this page never does: name a provider against a finding. The published summaries are public, but the patterns are the point — every provider in this corpus engaged with a developmental process, and this page exists to help the next one prepare, not to rank the last one.
- Cadence: updated as DSS publishes new evaluation summaries and as the Enhanced Audit Programme produces public artefacts. Every figure on this page states its as-at date; if one doesn’t, it shouldn’t be here — tell us.
This is what we read anyway, shared.
Support Ready prepares disability providers for evaluation and audit by reviewing their document sets against what evaluators actually look for. The analysis on this page is built entirely from published sources. If it’s useful, take it. If you’d like your own documents read the same way — that’s the day job.
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