Page 4060 - Week 13 - Thursday, 31 October 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
For families, this provided the opportunity to be heard, and to recognise that their future story does not need to be determined by their past. One family member stated that the process:
… made me see more clearly that what happened to me as a child wasn’t right and shouldn’t have happened. It was not my fault. It’s made me feel like a better person within myself. I don’t have those thoughts that I am a nobody anymore.
Lead workers and families also mapped the people currently providing support in order to determine how coordination can best be achieved. Often this involves supporting families to connect with informal supports and to develop strategies for supporting themselves. One family member described this process as helping them to move on. They said:
It helped me to identify the damaging people in my life and move away from them. It helps to see who supports me and build my confidence. I am going to uni. I would not have done that without this support. It’s built up my spirits to focus on what I want to focus on.
A lead worker also shared the service changes which occurred through the project. In their words:
… there is the same number of services involved with this family but the services have changed from crisis driven to sustainable supports.
This finding highlights the important shift which can occur by providing the right supports that can prevent families from cycling in and out of high cost and intensive crisis services.
The process then enabled families and lead workers to tailor a service to meet the family’s needs, on the basis of what is desirable, possible and sustainable for government. These principles included ensuring the focus is on family-identified outcomes as a starting point; enabling constructive conversations around possibilities, including harnessing family strengths to achieve their own outcomes; and intervening to resolve barriers which will lead to longer term sustainable outcomes for the families directly, and for the broader service system.
The project also prototyped a family information profile to support consumer-driven information sharing across the service system. This concept came from the families involved in the initial research and aimed to address the issue of having to tell their story time and again. The profile is intended to provide a valuable record of the family support network, past and present, and will assist in providing continuity when families move out of crisis, and no longer require intensive support. Feedback from families will be used to inform any future development of the family information profile here in the ACT. This phase of work will be independently evaluated by the Australia and New Zealand Institute of Governance at the University of Canberra to identify outcomes for individual families as well as improvements in the way services operate.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video