The challenges of implementing Throughcare - Australian Institute of ...

THE CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTING
THOUGHCARE
Kate Stevens
Department of Corrective Services
New South Wales
Paper presented at the
Probation and Community Corrections: Making the Community Safer Conference
convened by the Australian Institute of Criminology and the
Probation and Community Corrections Officers' Association Inc.
and held in Perth, 23-24 September 2002

Introduction
It was with keen excitement and enthusiasm but also with a dash of trepidation that I took on the
position Project Director for Throughcare Strategies in the NSW Department of Corrective Services
in June last year. Since then I have had some pretty sobering reality checks so now I would describe
my attitude as one of realistic optimism and I am enjoying the opportunity today to share with you
some of the experiences I have had in trying to put Throughcare on the map of the Department of
Corrective Services. So let me just briefly set the context for you.
Departmental Context
My Department in New South Wales is responsible for the management of correctional centre
inmates and offenders in the community supervised by officers of the Probation and Parole Service.
There are 27 gaols housing nearly 8,000 inmates (about 500 of whom are women) and there are 66
Probation and Parole district offices managing 18,000 offenders on community based orders. There
are approximately 6000 of us who are employed by the Department and this number includes about
500 staff in Probation and Parole.
In line with international trends, one of my Department’s core corporate objectives is to apply
effective measures to reduce the rate of re-offending. In the case of our Department, Throughcare is
the primary strategy to positively impact on recidivism.
Definition
I should say up front that although throughcare is ‘new’ in terms of official strategy, it is certainly
not ‘new’ in terms of many of the every day work practices carried out by a large number of our
colleagues. But it becomes a bit challenging though when such established work practices are to be
articulated into formal departmental policy. I felt that a formal departmental definition of
throughcare was needed to inform our own staff about what it actually is and how they fit into the
throughcare concept. In this sense it is not only the definition itself which is important but the
discussions surrounding it are also crucial. The definition then can also be used to inform other
departments and agencies who work with people in the criminal justice system about what my
Department is trying to achieve.
Let me give you just one example of the difficulties we ran into in defining the complex
departmental concept of Throughcare in one all encompassing but short and to the point sentence:
if the focus of throughcare is to provide support to avoid re-offending, who are the people who need
this support?
Clients, inmates, offenders, ex-offenders - this is not being obsessed with semantics! If we don’t
know whom we are talking about within what context, we certainly don’t know how to provide
appropriate services and support.
Well, the definition we have come up with goes like this:
Throughcare is the co-ordinated and integrated approach to the management of people who are the
responsibility of Corrective Services from their first point of contact with the Department to the
completion of their legal order, including their re-integration into the community.
You will not be surprised to hear that this definition is still a work in progress and if you have any
comments, suggestions and ideas about how this definition can be expanded and/or improved, we
can maybe discuss this over a conference break.
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It became clear to me early in my position that staff are embracing the concept of throughcare with
enthusiasm, albeit cautiously mainly because of the need for far reaching change and resource
implications. Despite the fact that much ‘throughcare’ already occurs, if the central objectives as
outlined in this definition are to be achieved, a significant change in the way the Department carries
out its business still needs to occur. For example, meaningful and timely sharing and exchange of
information across the department itself are essential and everyone involved in the management of
offenders must be quite clear about their responsibilities either as a giver or receiver of information.
Resources
So here I was 12 months ago all dressed up and ready, spending a lot of time talking about
Throughcare with different groups of staff in different forums in community offices and
correctional centres and all sorts of professional groups. I look around and I am all alone. You know
the story, resources are not exactly plentiful. But I have been successful in drawing on personnel
resources from other sections of the Department by cajoling and wheedling colleagues and roping
them into giving me all kinds of different supports - and it worked. As such I have become a living
monument to effective throughcare stretching across all sections, branches and units of the
department.
But seriously, there was a need to be clear about the parameters of my role and project to make
them both manageable and realistic. For example, the whole issue of throughcare reaching into
community support for a person after the completion of an order is important but not my highest
priority at the moment. While we are working on partnerships with the community sector and other
Government Departments, our main focus for the time being is on bringing our own house in order
as far as throughcare is concerned. This means that officers working in correctional centres (ie
custodial staff, non custodial staff including centre based Probation and Parole Officers), Probation
and Parole Officers in the community, head office staff and corrections health staff work together in
a co-ordinated and meaningful way to ensure the provision of seamless service and complementary
programs.
I am pleased to say that recently new positions have been created and we will be able in the very
near future to employ several new staff for the throughcare and electronic case management team.
By the way, the further development and expansion of an electronic case management system
which allows the recording and sharing of assessments, case notes and case plans electronically
across the Department will provide the infrastructure to implement Throughcare. NSW Treasury
has provided 7.25 million dollars over three years for this project. I can’t wait to have a team to
work with.
Workshops
A series of workshops which I held over the last 9 months, turned out to be an exceptionally
effective strategy to reach a great number of our staff. Now who do you think we invited to these
workshops?
The participants should come from the different sections rather than just from one of the
professional groups.
Well, you would think so ... well, we didn’t. The first workshop we held included only Probation
and Parole staff - about 65 - but I should say in my defence that it was organised as the result of a
specific request from a couple of the district managers of the central coast Probation and Parole
district offices. The feedback from the participants in this workshop in one voice was: “where were
the non probation and parole staff working in correctional centres, how could Throughcare work
without them?” And really that is the crux of the matter.
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The next workshops were held differently and included always staff from all sections of the
department. Unfortunately none of them have included staff of Corrections Health Service yet but
we are working on this.
The workshops provide participants with the conceptual framework of Throughcare, opportunities
to discuss it and relate it to their individual work roles. They also provide a chance to identify
specific issues in particular local work areas and to discuss them in the context of translating the
theory of Throughcare into practice, and suggesting ways to improve working relationships for the
benefit of Throughcare.
They also provide a forum to identify issues that will impact on future policy development in
Throughcare. The latter is particularly important in providing opportunities to staff outside the
Sydney metropolitan areas to have an input into the policy process of the Department.
Given that sharing information, whole of sentence planning and working in a holistic and integrated
manner are key elements of Throughcare, one of the most important aspects of these workshops has
been that staff working in different roles within the Department have come together to discuss
issues and communicate with each other.
Let me give you some examples which highlight the sorts of issues staff in our Department are
grappling with when looking at ways of implementing Throughcare.
Major Issues
I don’t really know in detail what the situation is in other Australian Corrective Services
jurisdictions but I hazard a guess that we all are faced with a situation where there is a sort of silo
mentality among different groups of staff formed either along professional lines or work location
lines. This little story I am going to tell you I’m sure is going to ring bells of recognition:
In discussing the need for a department wide resource directory that would be accessible to all staff
in the department to assist in discharge planning in correctional centres or community support in
district offices, I was told by one colleague that “we’ve already got one of those at our location” the
implication being, we’ve got it, so why do you need to develop such a directory? I said that while
they might have it at their location, no-one else had access to it and other people in other locations
might like have access to it as well!
We’ve had some laughs and close calls too. Picture this - the NSW Probation and Parole Service
writes about 28 000 pre-sentence reports in a year. That’s a lot of reports. In all the workshops
where correctional centre based custodial staff were present, they bemoaned the fact they had a lot
of difficulties getting access to pre-sentence reports on offenders coming into custody. Given that
not all of the clients for whom PSRs are written go into custody, it’s still a lot of reports which
could be passed on to gaols. There is a protocol in place for PSRs to be faxed to the Discharge
Summary Unit which forwards them onto the relevant correctional centre. So here you have it - on
the one hand a group of staff is adamant that they are providing good and relevant information and
on the other hand you have a group of staff wanting this information but say they can’t get it.
Now a solution to this may be to take up the suggestion of one of the workshop participants who
offered to take himself to the”end of that fax number” to ensure that there actually is a fax machine
and that the PSRs do not end up in cyberspace. Seriously though, this story is symptomatic of
situation in which each group carries out their business with the best of intentions and there are still
no foolproof protocols established which ensure that there is seamless flow of critical information.
And it is also symptomatic of a situation in which one hand of the one department does not know
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what the other one is doing. In the longer term the new e-case management system will enable
immediate access to PSRs as required. And of course then the next thing will be to make sure that
all those contentious issues related to the sharing of information such as relevance, format,
confidentiality and sensitivity are addressed well.
As I was saying before, the workshops have the added bonus of staff in different sections of the
Department getting a greater understanding of their different roles. To facilitate this process we use
a little exercise in which we ask the different groups to describe what they think the role of another
group is in the Throughcare continuum. Then we ask the group whose tasks have been described to
confirm whether their roles have been described accurately.
The results of this exercise can be quite revealing. For example, when a group of Probation and
Parole Officers was asked what the role of custodial officers in Throughcare was, one officer said in
jest (we hope) that prison officers’ role was to “bash prisoners”. As you can imagine a hush fell
over the room. If the four correctional officers present were offended they certainly didn’t show it
but they got their own back by making the most thoughtful, intelligent and insightful contributions
through the whole workshop. In a way what could have been a complete disaster turned into a
perfect ice breaker because while apologising profusely to the whole group, the Probation and
Parole Officer’s comments really opened up channels of communication and lively discussions over
morning tea and lunch. In the feedback of this session, the majority of participants made the point
that they had gained not only greater understanding of the different work roles but a greater
appreciation of the challenges each individual workplace faces.
Summary
Let me sum up - Throughcare is about creating and maintaining links with all staff groups within
the Department and relevant community agencies, both government and non government to ensure
a continuity of management and care of offenders whilst with the Department of Corrective
Services.
The most pressing priority for the next year will be the setting up of the e-case management project
which includes the ‘scoping’ of this project for a whole of Department perspective and this of
course will include wide ranging consultations.
While the notion of Throughcare is based on sound research findings, and while everybody working
in the field of corrections seems to believe that Throughcare is the right way to go, there is still
much work to be done to implement it properly and effectively for the benefit of reducing
recidivism. It is clear that resources and systems are needed to make it all work, equally important
is that people working in the throughcare continuum adopt a mind set which allows them to be
constantly aware of the whole context within which the work needs to be done and not just their
own particular section of it. Instead of an intricate flow chart on paper, throughcare must become a
flowchart in our minds.
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