Central Coast Community Women’s Health Centre

Question 1 – How have you adapted service delivery in response to the bushfires, floods and Coronavirus pandemic? When has it worked and when hasn’t it worked? How will this affect how you deliver services in the future? Have your service adaptations included better integration with other initiatives?

In relation to the Coronavirus pandemic we quickly moved our services to online or phone. This transition went well, clients adapted very well to the new environment and appreciated the continuity of support. We moved both counselling and our parenting groups online. Client’s who attended the online group particularly enjoyed the convenience of being able to attend group from home. One barrier was for clients who were not as comfortable with the technology, phone counselling was an option for them. A small percentage declined attending group online. Due to the demographic most of our clients fall into a younger age range so the percentage who struggled was quite small. Online group delivery meant that some very anxious clients attended group who spoke of not being able to attend in person. Some counselling clients opted to continue with online after we were face to face due to convenience. It has also assisted clients to still access a service when they have sick children rather than having to cancel a session. We now have the technology to offer blended delivery for groups going forward meeting the diverse needs of clients

Question 3 – What tools or training would support you to effectively measure and report outcomes through the Data Exchange Partnership Approach?

I find that client scores are not reflective of the outcomes we are seeing. This is particularly high with clients attending parenting group programs. When they score themselves initially it is often not reflective of where that are at as because basically they don’t know what they don’t know and then once they have finished their parenting education training they realise what they didn’t know and so the score may be the same or a little lower. I need some sort of tool or training that assists me to help clients to better reflect their current situation on initial score.

Question 4 – Do you already have a program logic or theory of change outlined for your program? Did you find the process useful? If you do not have one, what has stopped you from developing one? What capacity building support would assist service providers to develop program logics and theories of change?

Yes we do have a program logic and I did find the process useful. I attended a training day locally which greatly assisted me with developing our program logic.

Question 6 – What does success look like for your service, and how do you assess the overall success of your service?

We use a number of evaluation tools. For groups as well as using score I also use the evaluation developed for the evidence based program, these often give rich qualitative data. For counselling evaluation we have just begun using Novopsych and have a number of evaluation tools available to us, we choose which is most relevant for each client.

Question 7 – Do you currently service cohorts experiencing vulnerability, including those at risk of engaging with the child protection system? If not, how does service delivery need to adapt to provide support to these cohorts?

The majority of our clients are either at risk of engaging with the child protection system or already engaged with the child protection system. Most of our clients have or are experiencing domestic and family violence, homelessness, mental health issues and/or are survivors of childhood trauma.

Question 8 – If you are a Children and Parenting Support or Budget Based Funded service provider, do you currently link with a Communities for Children Facilitating Partner or other regional planning mechanism to understand what other services are provided in the community and what the community identifies as their needs? How does this work in practice? Would you value the increased support of being attached to a local Facilitating Partner?

We are well supported by our facilitating partner, this has been my experience throughout my time in the project

Question 9 – For all providers, are there other ways to improve collaboration and coordination across services and systems?

I feel it is working well for us here on the Central Coast, I don’t have any suggestions for broader improvements

Question 11 – Aside from additional funding, how can the department best work with you to support innovation in your services while maintaining a commitment to existing service delivery?

To become more innovative and flexible with how we collect data from our clients.

Question 12 – Is there anything else you would like to share about the ideas and proposals in the Discussion Paper?

Expanding the postcodes the service can be delivered to.