If you have been told you need an FCA and nobody has explained what that involves, this is the walkthrough.
A Functional Capacity Assessment is the piece of evidence the NDIS uses to decide what supports go into a plan. It is not a test you can pass or fail, and it is not a medical examination. It is a structured look at what you can do, what you need help with, and what would change that.
Here is what it actually involves.
Your OT should ask what the assessment is for. An FCA written for a first plan looks different from one written to support a SIL funding request or a home modification. If nobody has asked you why the assessment is happening, ask them.
You will be sent a service agreement setting out the cost and the scope. For a scoped piece of work like an FCA, you should be able to get a total estimate before anything starts, not an open-ended hourly arrangement.
This is usually the longest part and it is mostly talking. Your goals. Your diagnosis and history where it is relevant. What supports you have now, formal and informal. What a typical week looks like, including the bad days.
The single most common mistake people make here is describing their best day. It is a natural thing to do — nobody wants to sound less capable than they are — but an assessment that captures your best day will produce a plan built for your best day, and you will spend the next twelve months living with the gap.
Describe the average week honestly, including the parts that are managed only because somebody else is quietly doing them.
This is what separates a real FCA from a questionnaire. The OT should watch you do things, in the places you actually do them.
That might be making a cup of tea in your own kitchen, showing how you get in and out of the shower, walking to the letterbox, or getting on a bus. Capacity looks different in a clinic than it does in a kitchen with a bench at the wrong height and a cupboard you can't reach.
It can feel uncomfortable to be watched doing something ordinary. It is also where most of the useful information comes from.
Some funding requests need formal measures alongside observation and interview. These are structured tools with published scoring, used so that findings mean the same thing to a reader who has never met you.
Your OT should tell you which tool they are using and why. If a standardised assessment is being used and nobody has explained it, ask.
With your consent, an FCA usually includes input from the people around you: family, support workers, other clinicians. Their picture of a typical week is often more accurate than anyone's memory of one, and support workers in particular see things that don't come up in an appointment.
You control who is contacted. Nothing should be sought without your say-so.
The report is the actual deliverable. A good one has a clear structure: why the assessment happened, your goals, what was done, what was found in each functional area, what supports exist now, and what is recommended — with each recommendation tied to something that was actually observed.
The reader is not a clinician. It is usually a planner or a delegate assessing a funding request, working through a large number of files. A report that makes them hunt for the link between the impairment and the support need is a report that gets a weaker outcome, regardless of how thorough the assessment was.
You should get a copy. If there is a factual error — a wrong date, a misremembered detail, a support listed that you no longer have — it should be corrected. Clinical findings your OT will explain rather than change, but nothing in your own report should be a surprise.
Typically two to three contacts, then report writing time. If you have a plan review date, say so at the very first phone call so the work can be scheduled backwards from it.
Six to eight weeks before a review is comfortable. Two weeks before is a rush that helps nobody.
If you are on the Mornington Peninsula and want to talk through whether an FCA is what you actually need, make a referral online — sometimes the answer is that a shorter piece of assessment would do the job.
Usually two to three contacts plus report writing time. Allow six to eight weeks before a plan review date.
Usually an NDIA planner or delegate, and your support coordinator. It should be written for a non-clinical reader.
You should. Factual errors get corrected; clinical findings get explained.
Make a referral using the online form, ask a question, or just say hello. We reply within two business days.