At the National Disability Summit last week, one speaker (there were several, but this one stayed with me) shared her story of moving from a regional town to the city for work. She spoke about advocating for a Supported Independent Living (SIL) arrangement where she could live on her own, rather than in a group home.
She has high support needs. Her dream was independence. What made it possible?
“All the small things,” she said.
Succesful Independence is Built from the Everyday Tasks
Her OT had painstakingly documented every single everyday support she needed. All the micro-details. Things like what it took to prepare for, pour and drink a glass of water. Individually, they sounded trivial, but together they built a watertight case for a single living SIL arrangement.
She was lucky. Her assessor read the report and listened.
Independence didn’t arrive via a bold policy reform or a new funding category. It arrived because someone took the small things seriously.
Why Care Systems Overvalue the “Big Things”
In health and social care, the big, shiny things (like a diagnosis) often get the most attention, while small, everyday supports are relegated to the margins, assumed to be manageable, or absorbed by someone, somewhere.
But this often misses what really matters.
What Research Tells Us About Care Preferences
Research exploring preferences in community-based care has found that people prefer care that enables them to remain at home when the practical conditions make that possible. Location matters, yes, but it is not decisive on its own. Frequency of support, intensity, the intrusiveness of care, and how well services fit into daily life all shape whether a model feels enabling or burdensome.
Crucially, this work shows that preferences are not all or nothing. People are willing to compromise on one aspect of care if another aspect better supports their independence or wellbeing. Care is experienced as negotiated, contextual, and highly sensitive to detail.
This matters for SIL decisions. Individual living succeeds when the small, functional realities of daily life are understood well enough to be planned for. When those realities are vague, averaged out, or dismissed as trivial, independence becomes precarious, and risk is transferred onto the person living there.
The WHO’s International Classification of Functioning
The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning (ICF) highlights the importance of acknowledging the interactions between a person, the activities they need or want to do, and the environment in which those activities take place. This perspective acknowledges that disability isn’t from impairment alone, but from friction between bodies, tasks, spaces, systems, and expectations.
This matters because preparing a drink, moving through a kitchen, managing transitions between tasks, or conserving energy across a day are not inconsequential details. They are the activities that make up overall quality of life and wellbeing. When these activities collide with poorly designed environments, inadequate supports, or assumptions, independence becomes unstable.
By documenting all the small things, the speaker’s OT had made complexity visible… and therefore supportable. Health professionals and carers consistently replicate this attention to detail but often have no system or place to hold it.
The Cost of Missing Details in Care Planning
At the Summit, I repeatedly heard service providers talking about “taking the hit.” Not as an exception, but as a routine feature of delivering safe, humane and dignified care.
It might be unfunded minutes, extra check-ins or workarounds that keep people comfortable, and supported when plans fall short.
These, too, are the small things.
When care plans fail to reflect lived reality, providers step in to close the gap. Over time, this invisible labour becomes normalised and even expected. The system continues to function, but only because frontline teams absorb its blind spots. This cycle simply isn’t sustainable.
Why We Need More Colourful Care Reforms
Like you all, I am sure… when I hear “All the Small Things,” I don’t just think about an OT’s report. I hear Blink-182 blaring through some dodgy 2000s stereo, mocking boy bands and all things beige.
And honestly, that’s the energy care reform needs.
Not beige, formulaic, “boy-band choreography” solutions that look shiny and miss the point. What matters are the messy, punk like, human, small things that tell the story of what it actually looks like to live the lives we want.
How UNPLEXi Captures the Small Things
At UNPLEXi, this is the gap we are trying to address. All the small things are often missed in care because information is scattered, implicit, or stored in emails, paperwork, or individual brains. UNPLEXi is designed to make every day needs visible in a way that is shared, consistent, and usable across teams and decisions.
The UNPLEXi brain is grounded in the WHO’s ICF, to focus not just on diagnoses or funding categories but on overall functioning and wellbeing. This information isn’t locked in a single assessment but is structured so it can evolve – from intake to planning, from frontline to leadership, from review to reassessment – without losing meaning or nuance along the way.
The aim is not more documentation for its own sake, but for clearer shared understanding. So that decisions are made with the whole picture of needs.
All the Small Things can be more than a chorus… they can be what makes the difference between surviving and thriving.
If you’ve noticed small things slipping through the cracks at your organisation, we’d love to chat (and maybe have a sing-along?)
A, and the UNPLEXi team.