Meta Healthcare is a fast-growing company providing National Disability Insurance Scheme support and allied health services for people of all ages in western Sydney with physical and emotional needs.
Based in WOTSO Blacktown, Meta Healthcare has come a long way since it was founded by brothers Tristain and Peter Fauvette with Charlene Castillo in 2019. They had clear goals but getting traction took longer than envisaged.
“It was a lot of grunt work for the first two years. I was making peanuts and barely scraping by. Same with Peter, who was flying down from Queensland to see our clients for exercise physiology, and I’d drive him around to our clients all the way out to Freemans Reach.”
The original plan was to provide allied health services – psychology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and exercise physiology – but it didn’t take long before they were also offering support services to clients.
“As we branched out into support work we got to see people’s day to day lives and saw how much we could impact the community by providing that friendship and support.”
Support work is varied. “You could be supporting them in the community, helping them build and maintain friendships, helping them find work, keeping a job or just hanging out like mates and providing companionship.
“It can also come down to things like personal care, helping them around the house, assisting with showering, toileting, getting in and out of bed.”
The people Meta Helthcare supports typically have conditions or disabilities such as autism, schizophrenia, missing limbs, quadriplegia, traumatic brain injuries, multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy.
Tristain says the work can be both extremely rewarding and challenging.
“We go into situations where people are basically forgotten,” he says. “We try to help out in areas where there’s heaps of need for it.”
Not many providers see children, but Meta Healthcare decided to work in this area because there’s a big need for it, especially in the early development stages, and they help children from the age of just of two months.
“That’s 100% going to be the biggest impact in their life. If you can get a head start when you’re younger, that’s what we want to help them with.”
Meta Healthcare now has eight staff onsite at WOTSO HealthSpace in Blacktown, which is where the company is headquartered, with 25 support workers in the field.
“We bring a lot of therapy, physio and psychology clients into our space at WOTSO,” says Tristain. “We have physio beds in one room, next door is the kids therapy room and a multi-purpose psychology room.”
“It’s very good, very flexible. Maricar and Aanisha run the space and they have been awesome – I don’t know how they do it. It’s definitely a great community at WOTSO Blacktown.”
Tristain says the great advantage of the month-to-month leasing at WOTSO is the flexibility to scale up or down depending on staff numbers and business demand.
“We have about 70 clients at the moment but are growing fast, really fast, and are looking to expand to other areas of Western Sydney like Penrith and Campbelltown.” For more details: https://metahealthcare.com.au/