Evaluation of the Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (IHSS)

However factors such as agencies taking on tasks not included in their contracts and the existence of
gaps in service provision are likely to continue to create confusion about exactly what the other
agencies do.
While it is correct that explicit guidelines do exist as to what services service providers are expected
to deliver, in practice this clarity is often lost. Clients, and their needs and problems, tend not to stay in
neat boxes. For example, a woman’s need for child care services that would allow her to attend
English classes might be further caught up in issues relating to the state of her children’s health which
can best be addressed through a General Practitioner (GP), the choice of which is contingent upon
her having long-term accommodation. Moreover, clients certainly cannot be expected to know and
understand the lines of responsibility of the various agencies and so are likely to present with a
complex problem to any one (or all) service providers. For better or worse, service providers are
reluctant to tell a client that the client’s presenting problem is another agency’s responsibility. As a
consequence, service delivery is often demand-driven by the clients, in which lines of responsibility
and rationing of service become meaningless.
Some service providers feel – correctly or not – the unit costing/payment system exacerbates this
problem. Many, while still attempting to respond to clients’ needs, sometimes do so with a grudging
reluctance – feeling that they are having to pick up the pieces which are other service providers’
responsibilities without adequate recompense. In part, some of these issues may be addressed by
the measures outlined in section 4.1. However to some extent this is a feature of shared
responsibility in the provision of human services and may not be substantially different from problems
which existed under grants funding.
A further factor identified as a barrier to coordination was the competitiveness of the tendering
process, and this has resulted in some service providers being less than willing to work together. For
example, a few service providers expressed reluctance to make certain intellectual property that they
have developed (eg service protocols, evaluation processes and outcomes etc) available to other
agencies – anticipating that they may very well be tendering competitively with these same agencies
at some time in the future.
Some of the consultations revealed that the experience of competitive tendering had, in a small
number of instances, exacerbated existing tensions between particular agencies, especially where
one agency disagreed with the awarding of a contract to another agency. However, this was not a
widespread finding. Some disgruntlement with the tendering process was heard during the
consultations, but this appeared to be general dissatisfaction with the change from a grants model to
a competitive tendering model, and in most cases did not appear to have a significant bearing on the
way agencies worked together.
A lack of coordination between service providers results in clients not always receiving appropriate
referrals, increased workloads for individual service providers and duplication of services. Too often,
no one service provider has the ‘bigger picture’ of what is happening with their clients. Not
surprisingly, integration was best where all or most service contracts were held by one agency,
particularly where the agency also had responsibility for longer term settlement services. This was the
case in some of the smaller States/Territories and in some regional areas, where the entrant receives
a ‘one stop’ service. Attempts have been made, in certain localities, to offer an integrated service
while still drawing on the specialised expertise or resources offered by selected service providers.
This has been done by the lead agency sub-contracting a specialist (eg offering accommodation
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Evaluation of the Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy 27 May 2003