Housing and Support Program (HASP): Final Evaluation Report

1.2 Housing and supports –
previous research
In Australia, the inclusion of psychiatric disability
in the Commonwealth Disability Services Act 1986
brought into focus the distinction between illness
and disability. It was noted that illness should be
the domain of clinical interventions, while the
disability component should become the concern
of those skilled in the management of disability.
Whiteford (1994, p.343) argues that no single agency
should take complete responsibility for the lives
of people with mental illness (as mental health has
historically done). Whiteford outlined several reasons
for this:
access to social and disability programs available
to people with other disabilities should be available
to people with a mental disability. This is in keeping
with equitable access and non-discrimination in
service provision;
mental health professionals can specialise in the
provision of treatment and rehabilitation rather than
the provision of services that can be provided more
effectively or effi ciently by other agencies;
mainstreaming people with mental illness into
current social and disability services is likely
to decrease marginalisation and stigmatisation;
no single agency (including mental health) would
have suffi cient resources to meet the broad range of
services required by people with a mental disability.
Thus disability support is provided on some
assumptions about the desirability of moving care
and treatment away from a focus on clinical concerns
towards a broader community approach. The
research evidence supporting greater involvement
of the disability sector is increasing. Indeed, in
Australia, funding provided to the non-government
sector to support people with psychiatric disability
has increased by 294% or $75 million since 1993
(Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing,
2004).
1.2.1 Services provided by disability support workers
Support agencies work in collaboration with mainstream
mental health services and tend to target people at
the more severe end of the spectrum. They assist
people to connect to mainstream social and disability
services by linking them to community-based recreation
and vocational services (Walter & Petr, 2006). While
different models of disability support have developed,
the interventions provided seem to be common across
models. Warner and colleagues (1998) collected
information on the services provided by support staff
in a number of different support programs in the UK
and Northern Ireland and found that service provision
could be categorised into three domains — assisting
clients ‘within the home’, ‘outside the home’, and
‘liaising’ on behalf of clients (Warner et al., 1998).
Services offered within the home were classifi ed
as being emotional or practical in nature, while those
provided outside the home were classifi ed as social,
practical and leisure based (Table 1.2.1).
Housing and Support Program (HASP)
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